So mastodon.world, calckey.world and lemmy.world are all run by ruud and looking at mastodon.world it states they have 3 admins in total. So 2 besides ruud. And i assume the same group is involved in all of these.
This is just what i managed to figure out before joining lemmy.
I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
At this moment, I expect that ‘the average Joe’ is still on Reddit.
The current growth of the user base will be mostly technical users, that aren’t to afraid to try things and fail miserably.
By the time the Reddit population is fed up with all the ads, lack of content,… they’ll move over and (hopefully) find a few very stable and established instances. I even guess we’ll have a few instances that have almost no local communities, but are mainly used to jump off to other communities. But for now, I guess that the average technical know how in the community is a tad higher then ‘average Joe’, or at least they won’t be afraid to make a big mess and learn from that.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
Lemmy.ml was buckling under load, and at least one of the admins (and Lemmy developer) is an unapologetic communist & China sympathizer.
Beehaw.orgis a classic powermod situation where the admins want to micromanage every community. It also was struggling under load.
Lemmy.world was scaled quickly to handle the load, hasn’t been controversial in their policies, and for the most part just works.
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
Lemmy.ml was buckling under load, and at least one of the admins (and Lemmy developer) is an unapologetic communist & China sympathizer.
Beehaw.orgis a classic powermod situation where the admins want to micromanage every community. It also was struggling under load.
Lemmy.world was scaled quickly to handle the load, hasn’t been controversial in their policies, and for the most part just works.
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a lot of users are going to do the same. And even though I might swear in church now, I guess that’s the fragility you get with fediverse. Ruud can kill this instance at any point. He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. People are angry Reddit have 30 days but Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Reddit is a shithole of a company, but at least you can trust a company to like money and certain futures are simply not realistic because that would hurt the income.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
Why the passive-aggression? It’s rather difficult to ask the question without joining SOME instance. And a feature of the fediverse is that it really doesn’t matter which instance you join first, because you’re supposed to be able to switch very easily.
The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.
That’s one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you’re not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data?
Yes, of course… The data is on his server, he has access to his own server and everything that’s on it. This is true for any online service whatsoever, the only exception would be encrypted data.
If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
Not legally, unless the privacy policy is changed.
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
I mean, every website except one you run on your own hardware has this exact problem: whoever is running it owns it completely, and they set the rules (within legal boundaries).
The only ways you can avoid this are:
Run your websites yourself (which is kinda low-value; imagine the Geocities era, but everyone has to set up the hardware and the networks and the domain names and everything themselves), or…
Stick to websites that have an easy “escape hatch”, where you can easily bail at any time. This is how Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin and the Fediverse at large are designed: if your local server admin sucks, well, you can just join a different server, and you can still see content from all the other servers as before (assuming the place you “escaped” to hasn’t blocked them).
Bill is paid by using donations through open collective and Patreon:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
Which is confirmed in their blog post about Lemmy:
https://blog.mastodon.world/
So mastodon.world, calckey.world and lemmy.world are all run by ruud and looking at mastodon.world it states they have 3 admins in total. So 2 besides ruud. And i assume the same group is involved in all of these.
This is just what i managed to figure out before joining lemmy.
Also [email protected] might be a good follow.
I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
Do we know he’s a jolly good fellow?
I’m not too worried about it, because:
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
And when very disappointed, nobody stops users from starting their own instance and federate from there.
Knowledge does 🤷
People underestimate how important it is with a nice, stable, default experience for the average Joe.
At this moment, I expect that ‘the average Joe’ is still on Reddit. The current growth of the user base will be mostly technical users, that aren’t to afraid to try things and fail miserably.
By the time the Reddit population is fed up with all the ads, lack of content,… they’ll move over and (hopefully) find a few very stable and established instances. I even guess we’ll have a few instances that have almost no local communities, but are mainly used to jump off to other communities. But for now, I guess that the average technical know how in the community is a tad higher then ‘average Joe’, or at least they won’t be afraid to make a big mess and learn from that.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Here are the key factors I see behind Lemmy.world’s success:
As has been pointed out in other comments, the power of the fediverse is that if one instance becomes “evil”, users and communities can and will abandon it for another instance.
Isn’t it a bit funny that you are asking that after you have already joined the server and accepted all the rules, etc?
I mean that’s up to you to decide, idk. what answer you are expecting… You have the same information on him as we do, the info on his mastadon:
https://mastodon.world/@ruud
Tbh when I joined I didn’t completely understand the fediverse. I tried to join Lemmy One first because it sounded generic enough. It didn’t accept new joiners so I moved to the next generic one.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that a lot of users are going to do the same. And even though I might swear in church now, I guess that’s the fragility you get with fediverse. Ruud can kill this instance at any point. He can grow bored, decide he wants to put his money elsewhere, instance can grow too big for him to afford, etc. People are angry Reddit have 30 days but Ruud could easily kill this instance overnight.
Reddit is a shithole of a company, but at least you can trust a company to like money and certain futures are simply not realistic because that would hurt the income.
I have no doubt Reddit will still be here in five years. I wouldn’t bet the same amount on any fediverse instance
If an instance disappears people can move to another instance. A slight inconvenience but worth it to escape corporate control.
If you are community creator and lose all the data that’s a big problem
Why the passive-aggression? It’s rather difficult to ask the question without joining SOME instance. And a feature of the fediverse is that it really doesn’t matter which instance you join first, because you’re supposed to be able to switch very easily.
That begs the question, does admin has access all of our data? If he wants, can he sell the data to some big corporation?
The answer is always yes for hosted services. The data has to be stored somewhere, and it is readable if not explicitly encrypted on your device before being send to the server. Some things like passwords are usually handled differently though, they are not readable by anyone.
That’s one of the reasons why picking an instance is a big deal. You trust that instance with moderation and handling of your data. If you’re not comfortable with any instance then you should look into hosting your own!
Yes, of course… The data is on his server, he has access to his own server and everything that’s on it. This is true for any online service whatsoever, the only exception would be encrypted data.
Not legally, unless the privacy policy is changed.
Sounds like an unhealthy powermod situation again
This is a concern regardless of instance and the size of the instance. At least in my mind.
Personally I don’t have too much concern right now but if anything does come to light that changes that then I’ll just leave.
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
I mean, every website except one you run on your own hardware has this exact problem: whoever is running it owns it completely, and they set the rules (within legal boundaries).
The only ways you can avoid this are: