Nazi furries have been a thing for years. The regular furries don’t like them.

Hotmail and Gmail have “mail” in the name, too.

Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.

Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.

Maybe it’s just better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services instead of one monopoly service; and this is reflected in the way the world actually behaves towards these different services.

Facebook doesn’t have a lot of reason to go be telling exactly the truth there …

One note: It’s pretty rare for tech companies to directly issue profits to shareholders (i.e. as dividends). Rather, profits are usually reinvested into expanding the company; and shareholders make money by selling shares that have risen in value.

I’d suggest the “complex internal politics, manager layers, architects” – and the fancy offices, cafeterias, and other amenities – are actually quite a lot more expensive than the developers.

But don’t underestimate ads, and things that are similar to ads. In competitive markets, ads are really expensive, because ads are rivalrous. Venture A has to outbid Venture B for ad placement. The same sort of logic goes for hiring, especially hiring of trend-driven fields like project management. (“I’m a Scrum Master, who are you, a scum master?”)

Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?

Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?

Look at the actual numbers.

In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649

People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it’s not as expensive to run as you seem to think.

The “financial aspect” is much smaller than you seem to think.

It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.

You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don’t know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you’re making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.

Handling real money requires real identities.

Fascists aren’t morally healthy humans. Authoritarians can’t cope with social reality, where different people can have different opinions and loyalties and yet support each other. They always seem to end up succumbing to patriarchal cults, where Lenin-Hitler-Mao-Trump gets to do whatever he wants to your sons and your daughters, and you and your working class have no recourse.

Remember, there’s no revenue to compete over here. Analyses that depend on standard capitalist competition should be expected to not only be inaccurate here, but incoherent. They simply don’t describe the actual incentives for people’s behavior.

From a game theory perspective: You have no reason to believe that this specific payoff matrix actually describes the situation here. There are lots of other games besides the Prisoners Dilemma. Are you really sure you’re not looking at a Stag Hunt, or a Battle of the Sexes (terrible name, but that’s what the papers call it)?

Federated communities, so that if an instance goes down, the communities it’s hosting don’t just stop working for everyone else.

Usenet has some interesting differences from what we’re using now:

Clients and servers:

• There is no default UI. Everyone is using client software of their choice.
• Your client software — not the server — is responsible for keeping track of which newsgroups you’re subscribed to, and which messages you’ve read in those groups.
• Posts are copied from server to server based on whether the receiving server is configured to accept posts in a particular newsgroup (or collection of newsgroups).
• Posts are not retained forever, except by archive services like Deja News (later Google Groups). Servers automatically expire posts to save disk space. Expiration can be tuned; a server might keep sci.math posts forever, but expire alt.binaries.* posts in a day because binaries (i.e. images and other non-text media) are large.
• Server peering relationships are arranged by the server admins; there’s no default open federation.
• If a server goes offline for a while, it can reconnect to its peers and pick up posts that it missed. But because of expiration, it might have just missed some posts forever.

Newsgroups:

• Newsgroups look like containers-of-posts in the UI, but are actually implemented as topic tags in post headers.
• A newsgroup identity is global, unlike a Lemmy community. A newsgroup doesn’t have a home server.
• A single post can be in multiple newsgroups without duplication. This is the original meaning of “crossposting”. (Reposting the same message to different groups is “multiposting”.)

Newsgroup management:

• Newsgroups are arranged in hierarchies. Some of these are global (e.g. sci.* or alt.*) while others are regional (like ne.* for New England) and were originally unlikely to be carried outside of a geographical region.
• New newsgroups in most global hierarchies are created through a formal discussion and voting process, intended to ensure that a new group is well-placed and has an audience.
• In the original moderation system, you post to moderated groups by emailing your post to the moderator, who posts it for you.
• This was largely replaced by “retromoderation” which is what we think of moderation today: anyone can post, but the moderator is allowed to cancel bad posts. The first modbot was invented for Usenet.
• Federated deletion is handled through “cancel messages”. Supposedly, only the author, moderator, or a server admin were supposed to be able to cancel a message. However, forged cancels were a common problem.

Threading:

• There is no post/comment distinction; they’re all just messages, commonly called posts. A post can be marked as a reply to another post; a new thread is started by a post that is not a reply to any other post.
• Clients typically present posts in a threaded tree structure, but the server doesn’t need to know about threads, just posts. Threading is a client-side feature; the server just gives your client the posts, and your client constructs the threaded view by following references in post headers.
• Because newsgroups and threading are independent, a single thread can actually span multiple newsgroups! A conversation can start in comp.lang.lisp, then someone mentions their cat, then a reply crossposts to rec.pets.cats, a later reply drops comp.lang.lisp and now it’s a cat thread. This is either pleasingly organic or really annoying depending on your attitude.

In the tech biz, this has already happened. You’re living in the aftermath of it.

The Open Source movement created a strong shared infrastructure for the modern tech industry, all derived from Free Software components like Linux, gcc, and Python.

Linux caught on. It took over huge swaths of the tech world in the late '90s and early 2000s; displacing not only Windows servers but also SGI, Solaris, and most of the rest of proprietary Unix.

Companies learned how to build proprietary systems on top of a common open-source core; contributing certain elements back to that core while developing other components privately.

This is what almost all modern datacenters are built out of. Most servers providing most well-known Internet services are running Linux.

In consumer devices, it’s what Android, Chromebook, and Steam Deck are built out of. The modern Mac is a cousin: the Darwin core inherits from BSD. Your wifi router probably runs a Linux or BSD kernel.

You’ve seen the jokes about “the year of Linux on the desktop”. Thing is, Linux on the desktop has been an easily available option for decades. The joke is that most people don’t choose that option; they choose proprietary systems because that’s slightly easier at first … and then they normalize enduring all sorts of bullshit from those systems’ proprietors. (I mean, seriously! Windows XP didn’t run ads on your desktop, but today’s Windows does. Why? Because they know you’ll put up with it.)

Free Software started as a political movement about the rights of computer users to learn, share, and improve the systems we use. Open Source was the business-friendly depoliticized version.

For programmers — even if you’re not planning on working on Fediverse code yourself — I’d suggest actually reading the ActivityPub protocol. This will give you a better idea of what the technology is actually about.

Voting doesn’t seem to affect visibility very much.

🧛🐭📈🪨🔛

But stop trying to impose your point of view on others

… you realize you’re literally posting to tell people what to do, right?

(The only thing worse than complaining-about-complaining is complaining-about-complaining-about-complaining!)