Hey, so it’s not jerboa based and I ended up pushing it back a few weeks, but I’m now looking for beta testers on Android if you’re interested

As for the name, I think I’m going with Luna for several reasons, a big one being that someone suggested it and Flemmy was the only name I could think of beforehand

I’m posting updates to !flemmy@lemmy.world for now, if you’re interested I’ll be posting instructions for the beta soon.

Whether you’re interested or not I’d love to get feedback. I’m good with data and UX flow, but I mostly just comment - I need to learn how other people want to use Lemmy

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals

I can’t speak for everyone, but when I say lol I usually am trying to soften a self disparaging statement or expressing the absurdity of the situation… Or just lighten the tone because I feel like my message is too serious and I’m coming off like an asshole

I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media

Running a server isn’t that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it’s in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

That’s well within casual donation amounts.

But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs

I’m actually working on this haha.

It’s definitely a v2 feature, but it’s in the works

It’s weird to think about, but data has a shelf life. Software needs to grow and be pruned regularly, or it dies.

Social media is both - the data dump is useless without an ecosystem of tools around it, and if the data itself stops interacting with the zeitgeist of the parent society, it basically becomes an old journal. It’s interesting to a very specific group of people, and literally no one else wants to see it (aside from a few gems picked out and cleaned up for public consumption)

At any point we could go back to Reddits explosion after the digg migration. We could pull up posts that mirror exactly what’s happening now. It’d be interesting for sure, and there’s days of then-now posts that people could be making…but instead we just have people telling us about their memories of that process.

Why? Because that data is old and stale. You’d have to hunt it down with tools not intended for it, filter out the best of it, fix broken links, and probably put it through a slur filter

Probably something with sundials. ~6am going up to 12 at noon, then going 1-6pm if night and day are equal (I’ve never actually seen a sundial and I’m sure people got clever with them as time went on)

I mean a sundial doesn’t even track hours so much as daylight before and after noon

Nah, that’s not quite right.

Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue

Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.

Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem… For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don’t see most of the stuff from huge

So generally, it’s not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along

That’s certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back… Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there’s no competitor for them to jump to

I think they’re about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they’re no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

That’s certainly what the companies believe, is it actually true though? Musk said everyone but the bots came crawling back… Without showing numbers

I think tech CEOs badly want to believe this is true, because it would be an easy solution to all their problems. And with everyone doing something similar, there’s no competitor for them to jump to

I think they’re about to realize no one has to go to them, entry were just the convenient choice. Once they’re no longer convenient, people will turn elsewhere

I made 2 posts on Reddit, one was a meme about my friend jumping over me to see my username, the other was some random text post. Thousands of comments though

It’s just not in my nature… So much so that I’m trying to release a Lemmy app tonight, and I just remembered I haven’t started on the ability to post…

Everything else came easy to me - you should be able to click on anything, everything should stay where you left it… But I have no idea how people want to post. I should probably just do it now before I overthink it

I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital

Hahahaha…he didn’t start Tesla or spaceX

He did sue the founders of Tesla, the settlement demanded they refer to themselves as “co-founders” and not publicly refute him calling himself the founder.

There’s speculation that the spaceX founders signed a similar NDA, but the company existed before him, and their goal was always scaling up spaceflight

Musk is good at two things, fundraising from Uncle Sam, and hype. And he did those well, and if he stuck to that I’d still be singing his praises… Except he hasn’t.

He’s not a smart man technically - a decade ago I first read a post-mortem about how he was booted from the company that bought PayPal (and put him on the map when they sold it, as he still had shares). They kicked him out for utterly failing to build a payment platform as he promised, then pushing they switch everything from Linux to Windows, refusing to understand that was impractically difficult (and just a bad idea, even Microsoft runs Linux on their servers now). He kept pushing this and being distributive, and so they threw him out

Every time he’s tried to start something, it failed - he can’t build a team to save his life.

He’s good at hype and having money, I used to say “he’s a billionaire who read a lot of sci-fi growing up… That’s not the worst thing to be”.

Now? He’s convincing people his abusive management strategies brought this success, but those teams were long formed by people who deeply care about the future of humanity. They’re driven, intelligent, and passionate people - did they succeed because of him, or in spite of him?

I can’t say for sure, but I can say for sure that they could’ve done this with someone else at the helm, but he couldn’t have done it from scratch

I was using wefwef, it looks nice but it’s slow and has awkward UX. Every time I want to reply or vote, I have to take a second to think about which way to swipe

I think you’re into something about not complete or not good - I was hoping to be one of the firsts, but building a solid foundation takes time - I could’ve gotten something out there a week ago, but I’ve got big plans - I want to build discovery and sorting into the app, I want to be able to pull from multiple servers at once, and I want users new to Lemmy to have their hands held as they pick a server. And obviously, it has to feel responsive

To do that I had to build a data store and coax high performance libraries to play nice. I was pulling posts and had the account switching working on day 1, but I didn’t even start on posting until a couple days ago - and only after I made drafts that would reload when you go back

It’s easy to build something rough, fast, or inefficient Building something polished means working on the foundations, building it up, and doing and redoing things as you consider what feels “right”

Give Flemmy a shot in a few days if you’re on Android (more like a couple weeks on iphone). It’s still early days and there will be bugs and missing features, but, now that the groundwork is solid, it’s moving fast

I’m considering a free version on the app stores with limited ads(subtle and no tracking), a paid version without them, and one with optional donations on alternative stores.

I don’t like ads and I don’t want to shove them down unwilling throats, but most people don’t care (and frankly I need the money)

Among the ones that do, there’s those that hate seeing them, and ones with privacy concerns. If I make them subtle and offer an upgrade to remove them, I hope that’ll satisfy one group, and the other one can get a build where the ad libraries were never installed in the first place

On the plus side, I’m about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.

Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track

The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I’m terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I’ve fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa… That should count for something, right?