This fits my profile. I actively browsed and contributed to Lemmy for about 4 months following the US inauguration, but all the useful stuff I want is still on Reddit and Twitter. I still look at Lemmy around once per week, but honestly it seems like there’s a lot more political rage bait and not as much in the way of niche community content.

deleted by creator

If it’s any consolation, the admins of .ml will likely indefinitely host .ml with or without the support of patrons funding the development of Lemmy. Your support or lack thereof will never affect its operation.

Well if it’s any consolation, they would probably maintain .ml with or without a living wage made by developing Lemmy. Your contribution to their lives only dictates whether Lemmy the software gets developed, or they take another full time job and continue adminning on .ml

deleted by creator

Well, that’s actually the benefit of supporting FOSS. At some point along the way, someone can pick up the project totally of their own accord, fork it, and continue development. But I don’t see many devs lining up for the job of being accountable to someone as well mannered as you.

What’s really funny is that your comment that directed extremely aggressive energy at me for the crime of constructing a poor argument motivated me to shell out a recurring payment for the developers out of spite. I guess we really can get something done when we work together.

The platform itself is apolitical. It can be forked and used for any purpose by other creators. Any instance of a different political persuasion can be spun up and maintained separately, as many defederated instances have. This is a result of the project the 2 devs are paid to produce.

Given the name Dessalines, I’m guessing one dev is French though I suppose that’s too much of a reach. Regardless, I think you would be hard pressed to find many developers willing to commit to a project full time when they have to beg for donations from a relatively fickle audience like Lemmy users, just to reach a target of a middling income. Much easier to work for a financial firm building their app that approves predatory payday loans or whatever.

A federated interoperable platform will always have people to get “mixed up” with.

Comments are a hilarious minefield and a painful reminder of exactly how online leftists can never get shit done. We want FOSS federated social media platforms to escape the tech giants that would happily facilitate a fascist wave if it meant they can serve more targeted ads. But when that platform actually exists in a totally functional and apolitical way, we don’t want to support its development because the people willing to work full time on the project for poverty wages have bad political opinions. It’s so bad that we’d rather support Steve Huffman’s bot farm which is 1,000 times as politically influential as Lemmy will ever be at this rate.

Literally this … On any group chat with an image embed, link to memes from Lemmy instead of the image directly.

Fediverse can’t sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don’t have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can’t do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn’t be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn’t do it via Lemmy.

I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can’t do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can’t replace, but I’d rather never have to open reddit in the first place.

Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I’m still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.

Here’s a cleaned-up version of your Lemmy post that keeps your tone but improves clarity, flow, and grammar:

Did they forget to delete ChatGPT’s bit or did they intentionally copy the whole thing lol

I maintain my old hotmail account, but I also have 3 different gmail accounts. I also have a google account associated with my hotmail account so I can do things like keep a calendar and use Google docs with it. I imagine lots of people don’t realize you can make a Google account with an existing email, so they just switch.

Inshallah it shall be done

Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Not entirely sure how this applies to the discussion, it just came to mind lol

I’m so sorry but you really need to reevaluate this because it categorizes like 80% of authentic internet content as ads. Is a graphic artist who works commission posting their art on social media an ad, if they’re doing it to hunt for commission? A streamer who posts their funniest clips on social media to get more paid subscribers? A game dev promo-ing features in their next game patch?

I’m not talking about ads. Let’s say I’m a video essayist and I publish my essays on PeerTube. The recommendation algorithms aren’t going to show the free content I make to nearly as many people as if I put them on YouTube or Tiktok. And overall, that translates to fewer Patreon subscribers, FAR fewer.

From a content creation standpoint, it does kind of suck. There’s no ego about it. The system doesn’t carry your content to nearly as many eyes, even accounting for the reduced audience. Discovery and suggestion algorithms are extremely effective, and if I’m trying to get my stuff to reach as much of my audience as possible, I wouldn’t only be on Mastodon. I’m not just talking about mediocre content either - even extremely motivating stuff in the niche doesn’t generate even a small fraction of engagement as regular social media sites.

For some people, this is a benefit - it’s a poorly commodified system. For small content creators trying to build an audience and generate paid subscribers, it’s not enough. Most creators on Fediverse are contributing as a free or non-profit hobby.

Anyone asking you to file a report with police has likely never had to file a police report. They don’t even want to file reports for things that actually happened directly to you, if they can convince you out of it lol.