Comment on Emacs.ch (Mastodon Instance for the Emacs community) will shut down.
Rooki@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sadly thats fediverse, instance come and go as they like. Because behind them are humans that do this in their freetime ( most of the time out of their own pocket ). Big respect to everyone hosting a federated instance.
rglullis@communick.news 2 months ago
It shouldn’t be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
Bezier@suppo.fi 2 months ago
I actually kind of enjoy the “scrappy diy effort niche” thing.
rglullis@communick.news 2 months ago
it’s fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It’s not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.
Bezier@suppo.fi 2 months ago
Well, I guess it’s priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I’m really just here for the community.
matcha_addict@lemy.lol 2 months ago
The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.
Rooki@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.
The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt “ripe” enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.
rglullis@communick.news 2 months ago
Aren’t you kind of making my point?
I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.
rusty@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I don’t know exactly what happened. But I’m guessing he was doxxed and bullied by activists based on this post tenforward.social/@zyd/113086796304683411
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
That sucks
oblomov@sociale.network 2 months ago
@rglullis @Rooki (OT: the last paragraph in the post has a couple of typos. I believe it should be TINSTAAFL (also I recommend making it an abbr for the less informed), and there is an “under” that should probably be “understand”)
rglullis@communick.news 2 months ago
“No such thing as a free lunch” (alternatively, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” or other variants, sometimes called Crane’s law[1]) is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. **The acronyms TANSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TNSTAAFL are also used. **
You are right about the “under”, though. I “accidently half a word”, there. Will fix.
cabbage@piefed.social 2 months ago
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It's shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
"There's no such thing as free lunch" is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.
It's a dumb metaphor that doesn't even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.
That didn't mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.