My machine is not a workhorse. I got it second hand. It has around 8gb of RAM, and an 80gb HDD I found in a laptop.

But it’s enough to work as a testbed, so it’s fine with me.

I’ve finally powered on a 15 year old machine to run a bot I’ve been writing. The thing is slow as dirt and stuck behind a flakey power line network, but it’s working. I got to write my first systemd service definition, which is kind of cool.

Thank you so much. The more you can do now, the less we will all need to do later.

Betcha it’d be a territory or some other underfunded backwater that couldn’t participate in the government.

As a Canadian who wants to avoid all of this: please contact your representatives now and tell them you don’t want any of this. Call all the senators and congress critters and tell them this shit is crazy and needs to stop.

on Lemmy that’s just karma farming.

But if the only way to do it is to have ads or selling our data etc, then I don’t want that.

Nobody wants that. It’s a bunch of lil features:

• following users in Lemmy,

• allow mods flair users in a community (so subscribers/patrons can show off),

• Make it easier to see popular posts on Lemmy and Mastodon,

Stuff like that.

It’s not just ad-free, it’s actively anti-corporate, anti-advertising, even anti-monetization.

There are upvoted positive posts and comments about

1. the Switch 2 announcement (but not Nintendo’s legal policy),

2. the Framework advertising event last week,

3. Valve/Steam/SteamOS/Steamdeck/Gabe Newell in general,

4. Costco in general,

5. EVs in general (excluding Tesla and Cybertrucks 😂),

6. podcasts that solicit funding and carry advertising,

7. anime and anime adjacent products,

8. Lenovo’s laptops,

9. individuals selling stuff on Redbubble/Etsy/OnlyFans,

10. subscription razor blade delivery (not from Amazon),

11. and “voting with your wallet”.

It’d be cool if the platform made it easier for orgs to build and interact with a following here. Niches of users really like talking about them. That doesn’t mean ads, it means features that would benefit regular users as well.

maybe this place is just not for influencers - not like the corp platforms, anyway

The things people need to build a livelihood on a platform are quality of life features. In a lot of cases, I think it’s small stuff: being able to reward patrons with a tag on a specific community; automatically highlighting popular posts; making it easy to find a user’s monetization page; etc.

I think the fediverse will attract more and more people with its network effects, but probably never all of the people all of the time.

At the moment, Lemmy is an ad-free version of Reddit missing some community and notification features. There are good political reasons to be here, but that hasn’t driven a sustained increase in users.

So we won’t get critical mass for network effects by being a better Reddit.

One to make the platform self-sustaining (or grow) is to give creators a reason to use the platform, which will give people a reason to come and stay.

Absolutely - I wanted to list interactions between regular users and someone who makes money with a platform.

After a bunch of Twitter users (including journalists) bounced off Mastodon when Elon bought it, the fediverse needs to understand why, and think about what it means to be a viable platform.

I want to be among people who interact as equals, who share ideas, who cooperate in a genuine way.

I think online journalism might be a good example of influencers and users interacting as equals. Users provide extra information, ask questions, reify, and help highlight where the journalist can focus. The journalist does the leg work to produce novel news.

If we try a shortcut to more users through money, what is the point?

To build an interesting, self sustaining network, where people can express themselves fully, and understand each other.

The features I’m suggesting would benefit everyone: a decent view of trending topics/posts/tags; mod-controlled tags; stuff like that. Most users would find them helpful, but a few could use it to build a livelihood that others value.

The unix surrealism Lemmite is awesome. They deserve my donations. Saying that people shouldn’t be able to use the platform to express themselves rejects a whole bunch of people.

Now, I also think that the monymaker needing to serve millions of people can go and do that elsewhere.

That’s the issue. If we’re gonna get evil tech bros out of our human interactions, we need to build a platform that doesn’t reject people who like to eat.

Journalists need to get access to sources, and want to see when events are happening.

Documentary creators want a way to create interesting and useful videos that will earn them a living.

Streamers want a platform that can serve a bunch of users with near-realtime (okay, just fast) interactions.

That’s what OP’s link is missing: being able to use a platform to do your preferred job is one of the things that makes a platform compelling. Until we have that, we’re rejecting a big part of our audience.

The fediverse won’t succeed just because it’s better. It will succeed if and only if people choose it.

Part of that is making it monetizable. Influencers can build huge followings (and make some cash) because existing platforms recommend their content to other users.

Mastodon devs have chosen not to provide recommendations and quote posts. That’s reasonable, but it reduces the utility of the platform, and it cedes space to Twitter & co.

To my knowledge, the only creator that’s exclusive to Lemmy is the unix surrealism author. Until it’s easy to monetize content, we’re gonna have a hard time attracting creators, and a hard time attracting users.

Joining an existing project would be more helpful.

I think the mustache goblin tripped her. But she’s a Goblin Mom, so it can do no wrong.

I’m thinking she’s lounging seductively, but it’s a little hard to tell.

This is good advice. Ignore your reptilian hind brain and act like the person you want to be.

Yeah, sometimes you’ll need to stop and think about your options before making a decision, but you’ll be better for it.

Canadaland mentioned it in an episode a while back. I think it’s this one: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1059-substacks-founder-on-news-money-and-musk/

Remember that it can always be worse. Even if it’s irreversible in our lifetimes, it can always be hotter and more extreme.