I don’t agree with parent, but I also think that we should stop judging people by association. It’s not just because someone uses closed software that automatically means they are as evil as the corporations that abuse their power to ensure their monopolies. It makes perfect sense to say “I want to support what you are doing but I do not want to show it in a way that enables some third-party that I do not like”.

I’d agree with you if MS was applying this specific business tactic to destroy an established business. But there isn’t at the moment, so I am okay with using that until the market becomes big enough to actually be attractive to potential competitors.

I am saying this as someone who was working on an open source payment gateway for crypto and a crowdfunding platform for content creators on the Fediverse: not enough people are willing to risk putting their money in an unproven platform just because they don’t like the big corporations.

Surely, but there is not forcing you to keep using them when they change the rules.

If it’s any incentive, Github sponsors costs money to Microsoft. They pay for the processing fees, and Stripe is not that cheap for micropayments.

I splinter my identity off per instance as a choice,

Right, but then it goes back to my original post: why?

I could maybe understand someone arguing "I don’t want to be connected with only one instance, to avoid putting all my social presence in one basket, but then this is still not about identity anymore, because we could do that by using different “generic” instances.

It doesn’t seem to be a matter of convenience. If anything, it seems to be more work.

Is it about keeping different personas? Having different styles of writing and interacting with others based on the audience? I could understand that, but it feels a bit weird, as if we are not allowed to be ourselves.

Curious what topics those instances

Football, Basketball, American Football, Tennis, Self-Hosting and system administration, Fashion and Style, Cars… The whole list is on [email protected]

If I browse by “subscribed”, I’ll see only the things that I care about as well. I don’t need to sign up to different instances to filter my feed to suit my interests.

I might sign up.

No, you may not. Registrations are closed on all those instances. They are not meant to be the home of people, they are meant to be the home of the groups.

I don’t use my work email for private convos, just like I don’t use my junk email for coordinating group trips.

I addressed this in the final paragraph. It makes sense (to me, at least) to partition the communication medium based on the role or type of established relationship, but I don’t think, e.g, that you use one account to talk to your friends from school and another to talk with your friends from the swimming club and another to send pictures to people you went camping last summer.

do you have gmail? well that says something about you. Hotmail? same thing

Hard disagree. What aspect of someone’s identity can you infer seeing an email from [email protected]? Can you tell their political values? Their religion? Where they were born? Their lifestyle? Marital status? Even if you were to take a jab at their gender, you’d be relying on the user part, not the domain. Saying you can know anything about someone by their email provider is no different than claiming to figuring out someone’s personality by asking them their star sign.

which is choosing a topic (yourself) as the root of your identity

No. I don’t have a personal domain because I want to talk about myself. I have a domain with my name because I want a stable presence and my name doesn’t change, while my interests might. I don’t like the idea of letting myself be defined by my interests.

Tying your identity to lemmy (or the fediverse even) is a losing proposition.

Here, we agree 100%.

You know what you’re getting when you go in (a programming forum),

Are you sure about that?

Anyway, I just wanted to say I am glad that p.d exists and happier still that is one of the topic-based instances that is thriving. I know that I am part of the minority opinion in this debate. If I have my way, soon we will have “ActivityPub Group Servers” where people will be able to setup, moderate and manage an actor without having to be in the same domain. Then it will be easier for people to find and decouple the “community” from the “instance” and perhaps more people will be interested in using the dozen topic-based instances that I created last year.

Funny, I am of the exact opposite opinion.

I don’t mind topic-based instances for groups, but I really would not like to have my online identity tied to one specific, narrow interest of mine.

I agree so much with you, I am running a commercial provider for Fediverse services for almost five years. The problem is that we are still a very tiny minority relative to the amount of internet users.

No one is forcing you to see them, especially given that this is an open source system with open source clients.

Also, how much are you paying/contributing to the developers, admins and moderators in order to avoid the need of alternative methods of funding?

To be quite honest, I wouldn’t mind sponsored posts as a way to support a community or instance, as long as they were completely disclosed as so and if the sponsor had no control over the moderation.

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Yes. I do have someone who can take over Communick and has enough know-how to manage things or at least ensure that an orderly transition is possible.

Still, the best way to guarantee that Communick will be around for the next decades to come is by making sure that it becomes a viable business.

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

Most of these niche communities lend itself for community support and discussion around specific problems. There is only so much “news” that can be had around specific topics.

I usually favor bias towards action in these cases: there is nothing bad about just posting questions to a specific community (e.g, Python) and until it starts becoming a problem. When/if people complain about the excessive number of Q&A posts, two things could happen:

• The “I’m here for the news” people are in the majority, and the minority will then go to create an alternative “Q/A” community, like python-help or something.
• The “I’m here for the news” people are in the minority, and they will either unsubscribe or create a separate “news-only” community, like python-planet.

Anyway, I’m all for the idea of using Lemmy for Q/A communities and I’d rather we have people pushing for it than waiting for some “idealized” version.

But we’re missing an instance dedicated to that

There are instances already for:

• Programming
• Software Power Users, Tips and Tricks
• System administration
• VOIP
• Photography
• Hi-Fi Audio
• Car and Motor

What we need is to have people using them and willing to feed it with content.

Yes, but if you put it a public library you will be opening yourself for all sorts of copyright trolls trying to sue you for file sharing.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Monal works fine now.

No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.

That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.

Again, if “venture funding” is some sort of cheat code, why can’t XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?

nominally FOSS

Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes

Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.

The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays

rather about not shitting into your own water supply.

And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? “if you are on iOS, use siskin” is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? “People shouldn’t be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn’t spend our resources on it?”

Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don’t want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.