petunia

joined 1 year ago
[–] petunia@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It is kinda lame, but people who literally go out of their way to not harm anybody don't deserve to get smeared as if they are potential threats to society. The actual threats to society, and to children especially, are a lot more mundane and familiar. Climate change, the education system, capitalism, poverty, etc.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

Nope. If the site was about knitting I would have said the same thing.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Underserved niche" in the sense that the site outpaces almost all other servers by monthly activity despite going out of its way to contain its own growth.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.

Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.

I don't know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It's a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.

Yes, they are "provided as is, with no guarantees" but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing

Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.

  • mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
  • mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
  • switter shutdown because it didn't have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
  • ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn't sustainable financially to keep it online.
[–] petunia@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

All big fediverse instances are funded by users.

This isn't true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to https://fediverse.observer/list

OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago

They didn't bother outlawing possession of CP until 2014 https://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/17/world/asia/japan-child-porn-law Distribution was legal right up until 1999

Under the new law, people in possession of child pornography have one year to dispose of it before they risk prosecution.

Very considerate!

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

Absolutely brain-dead speculation based on literally nothing. Complicit in what??? The current owner is a very public figure, so they gain nothing and have everything to lose. It's just pure incompetence and mismanagement.

[–] petunia@lemmy.world 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Speaking from experience, they could fix their spam and abuse woes very easily by just closing new signups or restricting it in some way. Simplest would be invite-only (built-in feature of Mastodon), or restrict the signups page based on IP range whitelist/blacklist.

EDIT: Their domain has been reinstated, and they disabled open signups. New registrations now require moderator approval https://pawoo.net/@pawoo_support/111249170584706318

:pawoo: Announcement! Thank you for always using Pawoo. Due to server congestion, new registrations will now require approval by a moderator. Thank you very much for your cooperation.

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