If there is one belief that I’ve held for long is that we Free Software would be in a better situation than it is today if we simply dropped the whole idea “community”, “done by amateurs” and “volunteers in their spare time” and really start treating the whole thing as a professional industry. This whole xz crisis further exacerbated this belief.

Almost everyone takes this work for granted and this is why is not properly valued. We should raise the bar at all levels: someone who wants to contribute in a project needs to show that they can deliver everything, maintainers should not accept “half-baked” proposals because “it is better than nothing”, developers should be more than comfortable sending a quote with a proper rate to someone that requests a feature.

And if those people don’t want to do any of that, then let go see how much the commercial alternative would cost them.

We used Slack and we had a Confluence Wiki. No one bothered to keep Confluence up-to-date because everyone was just used to ask ad-hoc questions on Slack and get an answer by one of the respective team members. We “solved” this issue at one company with one reasonably simple policy: people were free to ask questions on Slack as much as they wanted, but the response should always have a link to the related Confluence page. You could even answer the question directly with a TL;DR, but the Confluence Page link should always be part of the answer.

Every time that there was an Slack response without a link to Confluence, the responder’s team would get a mark, and every month the team with the most marks would have to bring something to the rest of the company. Basically, it forced everyone in the team to step up their documentation game, and it got everyone in the spirit of “collaborative editing”: sometimes, people would just write create a page with a very basic paragraph. Another team member would use that to extend the answer and so on. In just a few months, every department had a pretty solid documentation space and we even got used to start our questions with “I looked for X on Confluence and didn’t find anything. Can someone tell me where I can find info about it?”

So, yes, you are right about the disconnect between “what experienced people want” and “what beginners want”, but even in this case it would make sense if most project managers used real-time chat platforms only for initial inquiries and triage, but used this inflow to produce long-term content in a structured document or wiki.

Do you believe then that all the work from people here is pointless, and that people are just going to leave Lemmy for the next new shiny thing?

I worry that you may be right, but at the same time I can not avoid the “History repeats itself. First as tragedy then as farce”:

• How many times have people said “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product”, yet continue to use ad-based (or data-mining) “free” services?
• How many times have we seen “good” startups become “evil” monopolies?
• How many times have we seen people feigning outrage at some company that abused their position but didn’t do anything because of “how convenient their product is” or “how cheap is has made something?” Complained about the “gig economy”, but went on to order food via some app?

It frustrates me to no end to think that the average Lemmy user is carrying a very expensive iPhone, yet can not be bothered to contribute even $1/month to the developers. It honestly makes me think sometimes that they deserve all the shit that keeps happening. It’s not for lack of warning.

Discord won because (…)

I’m pretty that they had valid reasons to have achieved such a dominant position in the market. But we can say the same about every other platform. Facebook, Reddit, Microsoft, Google… All of them were once the underdog who got a good product and leapfrogged the competition. The problem is what they did after to keep this position.

There is no way to get out of this cycle unless we start championing open source solutions, even if technically inferior at first.

You will be the only one at first.

What do you achieve compared to using a throwaway account?

If you use a thrrowaway, Discord still keeps their dominant position and have no competition, so they will keep enshitifying.

If you use a bridge, more of their accounts will be just bridging bots, real users will be on the alternative networks and they will be forced to compete.

You don’t need to self host, there are servers that do this for you

One person used Matrix and they sucked.

Judging people based on the messaging platform (or vice-versa) is one of the most shallow things there is nowadays. It’s like girls who say they don’t date anyone who uses Android.

Use Bridges. If you still need to interact with people on legacy platforms, use bridges.

Matrix make it super easy to interact with people on Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. Set this up for yourself and you get to be the pioneer of the group who can lead them to a better way.

In principle, I agree with you. But you are judging Reddit’s value by the looking at the home page and taking a snapshot. Instead of looking at it as a lake of mostly crap, think of it as Instead of a river that filters things out and holds the not-crap that come from the flood.

What do you mean? Are you talking about the software in general or that can’t login into my instance specifically?

I wish we had Google Play Music again.

Not exactly Google Music, but I recently started working on a Funkwhale instance where people can have up to 250GB of space for their personal music collection and where I am planning to have a store front for musicians who’d like to sell/promote their own songs as well. 29€/year if you go to https://communick.com/packages/access. Sounds reasonable?

What’s with the misinformation. This comment is from August 2023. Nitter is still going strong.

Last I checked, the people using XMPP are still running happily using servers and clients.

All 17 of them.

This is not about “my services”, this is about getting people to migrate away from walled gardens like Reddit and Discord. People are more likely to act if they hear from someone closer to them, don’t you think?

No, what I mean is replace what is on Discord by Matrix, and whatever is on Reddit with Lemmy.

If the mods are well liked and act in the interest of their users, even better. I’d be willing to support them with whatever they need in terms of technical support and how to migrate a whole community.

So the change to Discord was more of a practical one than any fundamental disagreement with the Fediverse alternatives.

In the case of Discord, perhaps a Matrix space (analogous to Discord servers) could be created instead ?

they actually are one of the communities that held a vote, and they voted to stay on Reddit rather than migrate to Lemmy.

That’s interesting. Can you link me to this discussion or poll? Reddit search, as usual, is not showing much.

Ok, so I created [email protected]. Follow-up questions:

• Do you want to become a moderator for it?
• If there is anyone you know from Reddit that you’d like to help migrate to this community, can you tell them to join via https://portal.alien.top? This will log them in *via Reddit and automatically subscribe them to lemmy communities that correspond to the the subreddits they joined.
• While the community here is empty, would you be interested in having the content mirrored to the community (via alien.top?)

If I may ask, what subreddit is that, and how big it is?

Even with “all the fuck ups from Twitter”, their traffic is down only 4-5%.

It’s going to take a lot more than just waiting for them to fuck up. Network effects are real and the big companies spent the last 18 years making sure that they built enough moat around their fiefdoms.

Protests are not enough. “Strikes” were the leaders announce beforehand how long they will paralyze is not enough. Depending on moderators who are more worried about losing their status with their masters is not enough.

We need to treat this as a fight. Get all the tooling that can be used to make as easy as possible to migrate and ensure that people can get their dose of dopamine away from Reddit. Then things will start looking better.

I know that is a big ask, but would you be interested in helping bootstrapping these communities here? I recently created https://healthy.community/c/mindfulness and https://sfw.community/c/foodporn as part of my fediverser project, but these are not communities that I am not personally invested in. It would be a lot better if someone already helped to shape its general direction.