cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/16660104
Consider supporting Lemmy development or donating to your local server if you have the means. Peace!
Ugh! Can’t they just monetize the sale of our personal data and push nauseating ads every other post… like any other respectable post aggregation platform?
Ads they won’t (At least I believe so.) But I won’t be surprised that some data harvesting companies have servers set up to collect all the data, aggregate, and sell it. Lemmy is an openly federated platform after all.
sell it
Sell it? For what, 0 dollars? If anyone wants the data, they can just set up an instance themselves.
The data is freely available. Just like open source stuff.
The vaule of the data totally relies on the aggregation process. It involves grouping, categorizing, and linking the unstructured data into a relatable and structured format. For example, A data harvesting company can use their own existing data and link a Lemmy user to a known identity or the probability to a known identity, using techniques like NLP and statistics. That’s value.
Data most of the time are free, but there are also datasets sold for a price.
I think it’s a symptom of Lemmy’s core premise - where do I direct funds as the “common” user (read as less technically sophisticated)? To access and engage with Lemmy I…
- use an app…
- that channels a specific server…
- contained within are individual mods that maintain communities and curate content…
- and all of that lives within the larger “world” of Lemmy as an idea
There are many hands in that chain. Your dedicated users can handle negotiating that decision maybe, but the “common” user cannot - and this post is trying to discuss Lemmy at scale, so you’re talking about that “common” user.
Again, it’s counter to the founding spirit of Lemmy, but we’re missing a centralized path to supporting all of the distributed hands doing work on this idea. Not an easy problem to solve, but one that should be acknowledged.
The Lemmy devs are a bunch of tankie weirdos, so I’m definitely not going to give money to them.
Yeah they have made it clear they don’t want me around, on top of that. Donate to instances, not the devs.
Thanks. I was about to post that I haven’t yet decided whether to donate to my instance or the developers. I might just go with your opinion
Edit: although after reading, I’m not entirely sure. Part of supporting freedom to discuss is also supporting freedom to discuss things you disagree with or even things that are genuinely hateful. I do tend to end up more on the free speech side than the cancel side. The posted thread from archive at least the complainant moved on: we need to be able to vote with our feet like that
Lemmy.ml is the devs instance, and they have a habit of banning anyone who even slightly differs from their opinions. Basically, if you’re not a tankie like them, they will likely ban you.
They’re not interested in free discussions.
But they just personally don’t want that on their instance while they create the lemmy software that allows for everyone to speak their opinions.
They have an extremely low bar for censorship, and I have already seen signs that they will abuse their role to keep their finger on the scale. For example, they selectively federate mod logs, and seem to be running a custom build which allows them to do this. What other forms of fediverse trust are they willing to compromise for ideological purity?
Do you have any evidence for this, or are you just looking at mod logs across instances? There have been about a billion little things that have slowed or stopped content from sharing properly over the history of this system so far—how can you be sure there is malevolence on their part and not simply a bug that hasn’t been patched?
Spoiler: They don’t. They are also not letting the absence of facts hinder them from claiming stuff to be true. Subsequently they worry about why their comments are being moderated.
Slight correction: Lemmy.ml is their reach-out and diplomacy instance. Their actual instance is lemmygrad.
I guess their diplomacy with me was to follow me around and downvote everything I posted until I just abandoned my original account.
Exactly they only harassed you instead of sending you straight to permaban gulag. Took me all of four or five days to get banned from lemmygrad and that’s without even posting in their communities.
Trust me, the Lemmy devs do not support freedom of discussion.
Yeah, they donated their spare time to give you a decentralized platform where you could criticize them because they want to stifle “freedom of discussion”… That the lemmy.ml instance is heavily moderated on stuff like imperialist propaganda is a non-issue for freedom of expression due to the nature of federation. The devs do not even want their instance (lemmy.ml) to be the biggest, but actively promote joining other instances.
You confuse your right to express your opinions with the privilege of someone else providing you a platform for you to express them on. The devs provide the former without obligating themselves to be the ones to give you the latter.
You’d have a better point if the rules against “imperialist propaganda” were more evenly enforced to include all forms of imperialism.
But at the end of the day, when given an opportunity to reflect their own values in the way they run their instance, they have chosen a very restrictive framework to that end. I don’t know how you can come to any other conclusion. It is clear that their development effort is not done to protect any speech besides what they have deemed acceptable, and as far as I am concerned, they have repeatedly shown that they will happily keep their fingers on the scale to whatever extent possible. This is why they will ban people for commenting on other instances, and then not federate the mod logs, etc. These things should absolutely be seen as evidence that they will exert control beyond their own instance if they can.
A lot to unpack here…
include all forms of imperialism
Being mainly concerned with global economic imperialism does not imply acceptance for more traditional imperialism.
reflect their values
Instances are independent and federated, hence do not need to reflect the values of the project as a whole in any way. These properties of decentralization are the values of Lemmy.
I’ve seen the rest of your claims before and you have been asked to present any facts contributing to them elsewhere. Seeing that you still have not responded to them, I will refrain from discussing it in depth for the time being.
I get the impression that your bar for “evidence” are lowered due to some personal experience. To actually engage on a point you made, modlogs have been a mess for a while and there are good reasons not to federate all details of content moderated (such as child porn). It seems weird to me that you contribute this to an agenda of the devs trying to control other instances when they were the ones that gave the other instances their independence in the first place. These actions also do not further any such agenda in a meaningful way. The much simpler and probable explanation is that engineering stuff like this is hard.
It’s extremely easy to see that the modlog on .ml specifically doesn’t match the modlog on other instances, and for issues which have nothing to do with csam. This whole dismissal of it “being a mess” is a pretty convenient excuse for the people who are literally implementing these features. We also know that they never seem to show any admin actions, though this could be attributed to them using alts to moderate. Still kind of shady, but I guess marginally less so.
If .ml admins would care the explain why their build sure seems to behave differently in a few key areas, then it would go a long way towards assuaging these fears. Or perhaps, if they took concerns about their heavy handed moderation more seriously, they would indeed get the benefit of the doubt in regards to their broader intentions.
You are confusing freedom of discussion to using an specific instance with specific rules. Lemmy is clear proof of what you say is not true, and you are incorrect in your deductions of what/why and who.
I’ll hang into my cash and hope for a fork by some non-tankie devs.
I just want Reddit back, it was much better. But it’s dead.
Its been dead ever since normies found it and took it over. Around when /r/wtf turned into into a G rated Disney movie to appease advertisers or soccer moms, etc.
I know, it’s such a shame.
I’d bet my life savings they’re already funded by the CCP/Kremlin.
… Can I have your reasoning? Just because they are communists doesn’t mean they are foreign agents, all it means is that they are authoritarians. Besides,idue to lemmy’s federated nature the governments would be better off infiltrating or straight up buying larger social media companies
A lot of them aren’t actually communists, that’s a facade. I have no problem with most communists, it’s a wonderful theory and I get along much better with them than actual capitalists. In fact, I suspect a lot of them aren’t even people, they’re LLMs.
Lemmy.ml is a mouthpiece for the CCP. They aggressively spread CCP talking points. I abandoned an old account because they followed me around and downvoted everything I posted. This was right after the reddit exodus so I was posting positive, funny memes to help Lemmy grow. They’re very quick to delete and ban people who disrupt their echo chamber, and in my experience they almost never argue in good faith. A lot of them seem like bots, if you talk to them you’ll get weird, non sequitur responses.
Lemmy is a easy target for propaganda, there’s very little oversight.
not every idiot on the internet is funded by the ccp
Of course, but when someone is involved in leadership of a community that constantly spreads CCP propaganda and organizes to maliciously downvote people who push back against it, it’s quacking like a duck.
I’ve subscribed to patreon in the beginning, and one of the perks was supposedly access to a private group with the devs on discord or matrix, forgot which one. After 3 months and a few questions on how and where to gain access that went completely ignored, I stopped. Not because of the money; but because empty promises don’t sit well with me.
Edit: They still list “access to the development chatroom” as a perk, now even in the $1 tier. Used to be only from $5.
I’m a monthly donor :)
Seeing your comment I was like, oh I know this guy. And then I remembered you are the one building the lemmy frontend I use. Thank you :)
Me too! It feels great, honestly. Highly recommend.
I had no idea it accepted donations, if not for this post I would have no idea where to do it. And still not sure how it works and where the money is for exactly. Is it like sponsoring servers for 1 particular instance?
The links in this post are for funding the two developers who work full time on Lemmy, the software.
The instances are sponsored separately via their own contribution links. E.g. look at the sidebar on lemmy.world and you’re probably gonna find them.
For the system to work we need to fund both the software development and the instances. Currently the software development funding is further behind as it still doesn’t cover two modest salaries. On the other hand I think lemmy.world is sustainably funded. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
That’s useful thx for the intro.
I think it’s enough for the big picture, and it enables me to make several follow up questions such as
I had no idea this was in the hands of 2 people. Do they really make a living primarily on crowd sourced funds? Exciting and scary for the future of software in general!
There’s a bit more detail here. I think I saw something about NLnet funding getting renewed recently. There are other open source contributors too, but these two are the main Lemmy team.
I’m poor af alright?
53k monthly active users is way less than I expected. But makes sense with how slow things are here.
Need more bots
Said no one ever.
How would bots help? No one wants to interact with a non human
Using this as my opportunity to brag that I have been a donor since the Reddit exodus! Hopefully I am donating to the right place:
The official Liberapay link now points to https://liberapay.com/Lemmy/.
yeah that’s the main dev of lemmy, but there’s a separate lemmy liberapay too now (both are ok probably)
Aren’t they a tankie
Have a look at their profiles and decide for yourself.
I know people like to shit on the Reddit gold concept. But I still think it makes sense and is one of the least obtrusive ways to raise funds sustainably.
And it was fun to let people know how much you appreciated their comment ot post.
I give $1 a month on patreon, hopefully that’s enough cause I’m broke AF.
If you’re broke, don’t give. I think there’s enough of us who can afford a few bucks a month and we should get more people to do it.
It’s a dollar more per month than most of us, including myself, will ever give.
i was once told to hotlink images from other hosters… as opposed to uploading to lemmy. (to save on resources!)
Hotlinking is stealing. Besides servee owner could change the images your hotlinking to. Or he coukd delete it altogether
Haha I remember seeing the geocities threats about hotlinking.
The web is built on hot linking hypermedia. It is more fragile obviously, but it distributes the bandwidth and storage load. If nobody hotlinked, then small forum admins/Lemmy admins/etc. have considerably more cost to bear.
This meme is hotlinked, as God intended.
If the server owner isn’t fine with others hottlinking they can simply deny requests not related to there website(s). On that note, I hope you are donating to your instance, otherwise by your logic you are stealing there resources.
I hope you are donating to your instance, otherwise by your logic you are stealing there resources.
How is that my logic? Admins of my instance are fine with people using their instance without donation so there is nothing unethical here. If people must pay to use their instance then it can’t be called “donation”, it’s called “payment”.
If the server owner isn’t fine with others hottlinking they can simply deny requests
Can I use same logic to say if you are not fine with people robbing your home, you must lock your door?
Admins of my instance are fine with people using their instance Fair enough, it appears they are completely happy for you to use up a small piece of there resources
If you can’t be bothered to spend 5 minutes to put up the magical “do not use my resources” message (origin: Same-site) in your site’s headers, then I think people would believe that using up a portion of your bandwidth is fine and act accordingly.
We like free stuff?
I would if I had money :(
poor losers like us are the ones likely to spend our time in places like this.
and poor losers like us dont have the money to donate.
I would bet that at least 90% of Lemmy could afford a recurring donation of $1 to $3 per month. If 90% of 50,000 users donated $1 per month, they could bring in $45,000 per year. Currently, the 1172 donators are donating even more than that, which pays for 1 full time developer. If we picked up the slack, they could afford two, effectively doubling the dedicated work output.
It’s that simple. Either we band together and keep this system afloat, or we give our data to corporations so they can sell it and pay the bills that way. There isn’t really a third option.
Edit: I can’t believe this has been up this long and nobody has corrected my awful math. It isn’t $45,000 per year, it’s 45,000 users donating a combined total of $540,000 per year. Basically, 90% of us donating $1 per month could take this rocket ship straight to the moon.
Jimmy Wales over here.
