FOSSDLE PieFedEmacs.ch (Mastodon Instance for the Emacs community) will shut down.
submitted by
rglullis
emacs.ch/@emacs/113087752901949391
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.
I believe in co-op instance management solution like beehaw uses.
$2.00/year would mean i would require 200 active paying users per year. thats not too bad
the world as it is with its twitter/reddit is survivor bias. so many other social media sites have come and gone, why would the fediverse be any different?
eventually it will be instances who solved for the long-term problems of financial solubility and technical maintenance requirements.
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.
I actually kind of enjoy the "scrappy diy effort niche" thing.
it's fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It's not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.
Well, I guess it's priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I'm really just here for the community.
Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.
The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.
If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.
The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.
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.
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.
I don't know exactly what happened. But I'm guessing he was doxxed and bullied by activists based on this post https://tenforward.social/@zyd/113086796304683411
That sucks
I totally get where they're coming from with that shutdown announcement. I've had to "talk myself off a ledge" a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there's eventually going to be something else later.
What suggestions do you have to change the way we're treating/running it currently?
Plain and simple, instances should require some form of contribution from all members. Let's stop pretending that the people here can not pay a dollar or two per month.
I think a dollar or two per *year* would suffice if all users paid it.
FYI, if you really think that's enough then you should check out https://feddit.org/post/2600584
The most efficient large instances cost ~$1.40 per user per year for hosting costs, and that's if you value the admin/mod costs at $0
A dollar per year won't even cover the storage bills, much less the labor of admins and moderators.
@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”)
"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.
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.
Thank you for pointing this out
You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.
If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do *just that*, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.
The fact that things do not have a *price* do not mean that they are *free*. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.
Should have used Vim instead, that's a real text editor. No-one who starts using it ever moves on to something else.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux is actually Emacs plus Linux. Linux alone is not an operating system. It's just one component of a fully functioning Emacs system made useful by the Elisp interpreter, buffer editor, and vital system components comprising a full OS.
Some computer users run a modified version of the Emacs system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Emacs which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Emacs system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is used in combination with the Emacs operating system; the whole system is basically Emacs with Linux added. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of Emacs plus Linux!
There seems to be another side to this story as well. I'm not quite invested enough to dig into it, but it might not be such an awful loss.
Good find!
I was surprised I never heard of it, had a look, it's a Mastodon instance, so that makes sense.
Yeah, I don't really care for micro blogging.
Quick archive it All
Use archive.is or archive.org
If this later returns as
ed.ch(more streamlined and lightweight, minimal featureset, perhaps not even the ability to store remote files so as to avoid the CSAM issues, etc) it'll be The Day.