The only thing I really have to add regarding “shiny new features”, is you can fire up something like VirtualBox and make “virtual” installs of other distros on your current machine.
A virtual machine or “VM” is basically running an emulated computer on your currently running computer, just like it was a program or game. But everything is self-contained in that emulated system.
So in Mint for example, you can still download other distro ISOs, get used to running the install process, trying out new things, basically just playing around and experimenting, because if you bork the whole thing it won’t affect your working “bare metal” system you’re using. You can just delete the file and start over as if it were a brand new computer! It’s strangely fun and has a lot of practical uses. (You know, like seeing what all this fuss is about with Temple OS for instance lol)
You can find a ton of interesting distros to play with on Distrowatch.com for instance, from stuff that’s meant to run on embedded devices to stuff that’s straight up memes. Lol
If you decide to actually switch your bare-metal system using the advice above, you’ll have a lot more experience then. :)
As for other distros, distro-hopping can be a lot of fun, but just remember in the end, there’s not as much difference between distros as it seems.
Mostly it’s about whether it’s rolling release or LTS, the desktop environment it starts with, and the packages / package-manager it ships with, aside from different specific customizations that team might have done.
Essentially Linux is Linux, but different distros cater to a certain kind of use case, audience, community, and so on.
The beauty and fun of Linux is choice and always having more you can learn!
Also Mint is often touted as a “beginner distro” but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a main driver for pros! There’s nothing wrong if you find you enjoy sticking with it in the long run. :)
I recommend EndeavourOS primarily because of it’s ease of use and rolling distro means you’ll have access to the latest bug fixes and patches (and a very active and supportive community), whereas it does come with the drawback of requiring to fix things every now and then if you’ve installed packages from places other than endeavour/Aur or require packages/apps that are older.
Yay (package manager) is very easy to get using as a beginner, however, if you don’t want rolling updates and just large update packages similar in scope to windows service pack updates I’d recommend popos or the sister/base os ubuntu. (fedora apparently may be good in this instance as well but I’ve very little contact with the OS and have been avoiding RHEL-related products recently because of their anti-consumer and anti-open source actions recently).
Ultimately it’s definitely recommended that you try a few distro’s to get a feel for what you like and then customize to your hearts content.
distrowatch.com if you’d like a more in depth review of various distros and what their performance bonuses or problems are.
EndeavourOS with xfce4 is very clean and quick to pick up with their little introductory/learning module that they include (once installed or on live, it will provide a popup that includes the following):
Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example !main@pigedove-lemmy-clone-u9568.vm.elestio.app in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!
I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.
These are supposed to generate an instance agnostic link regardless of who clicks it. That means they’ll go to their instance’s version of your page, which means they can subscribe or whatever with their logged in account. Rather than going to an entirely different instance, then having to manually search for it in their own instance. However, the caveat is that not all apps have adopted these links - they work on the website, but not all of them work in Jerboa, for example.
There’s also @user@instance, this doesn’t automatically make a link but if you start typing it (on the website) then you’ll get a popup window with usernames. When you select this you’ll generate the code @user@their_instance. This links to the user’s instance, not the viewer’s instance, but it also sends a mention to the user. So if you reply to another user and mention them, they’ll get a notification. I think you can also fiddle with the link text with like [link text](https://their_instance/u/user) and it should still send a mention, but haven’t tested it.
You seem to use the word censor a lot. For someone who who clearly has no idea what freedom of speech means.
Let me give you a clue. Your freedom of speech in no way forces others to provide you with a platform. Just governments not to silence you. Private citizens running web sites are not governments. So have no obligation to support your ideals.
When private community moderators do not want to deal with the opinions you push. They are not removing anything from you. You are failing to sell your ideals in a way that appeals to the people you are trying to force your ideas upon.
If you want to communicate with no limits. Host your own community on your own instance. And hope you do not piss off enough people to be de federated.
I wouldn’t suggest using blahaj as a home instance. It’s one of the instances that pussyfoots around with defederating from hexbear, and I think it disables downvotes, which just means the content isn’t voted on democratically, which fucks up the aggregation and doesn’t give you an accurate view of Lemmy as a whole.
Cool communities there, poor admins. Stick with lemmy.world or pick a different home.
🎶To be fair🎶 .world isn’t without it’s own problems, mostly getting DDOS’d all the time, so if you’re gonna look for an instance, I’d try to pick a lesser-known one than .world or the other big ones. Probably being a hypocrite here, since mine is arguably the biggest meme community on Lemmy right now, but I think that’ll change given time.
Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.
I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different
Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess
I don’t see why not - there are loads of other sites, let’s say DDL (roms etc) and various self-hosted blogs that chug along for years at the expense to the owner.
With Lemmy, the main concern would be growing storage, but that’s mostly solved by using something like B2 or Wasabi to store images, instead of the local server. B2 also recently changed their plans to make it free to download to a certain extent (prior to this, you had to pay for downloads) which makes this route even more viable.
I’m aware of lemmyworld and dbzer0 being very public about their donations, and lemmyml has been run by the devs years before we migrated. Lemmee’s admin is extremely active in the fediverse so that’s likely to stay too. We’ve only migrated from reddit in the past few months, so i’d say a lot of lessons have been learned in that time, as well as the viability/sustainability of running reasonably big instances.
A fair few have folded in that time too, some just disappearing out of the blue (vlemmy, lemmyuk, lemmyfilm) and others not able to manage the moderation as well as abusive users. I don’t think any have folded from it being too expensive to run - but I could of course be wrong there.
Personally, my blog site costs about $200/yr to run out of pocket, and is quite manageable at around $16/mo - comparable to a multiple-screen HD netflix subscription maybe. For a moderately used lemmy instance maybe you’d be paying $600/yr - about $50/mo which is still reasonably manageable. If just two users donated $50, your out-of-pocket costs drop to around $40. If all your users donated $2, assuming 100 users, your out of pocket drops to around $34.
The last time I checked, the largest instance Lemmyworld costs over $1k/mo to run (this also includes sister site mastodonworld, which is on separate infra but managed by the same core admin team IIRC). As of today there is a 4 month donation buffer, but looking at the graph on OpenCollective at least it looks like the admin team may need to cover a few hundred $ out of pocket if the buffer runs out, as monthly recurring donations is lower than the infra expenses. There are occasionally some very generous donors so I think it’s financially sustainable for the time being.
Overall I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about, this is the fediverse so you’re free to have an identity on any instance and still interact with the various communities. It’s not like Digg or Myspace where “when it’s gone, it’s gone”.
I think it’s more sustainable then Facebook ,Twitter and others. Why? Because it’s federated! if one instance goes bankrupt or shuts down for whatever reason it doesn’t close down the entire program. If anything, at worst a portion of Lemy communities would get erased from history. Lemmy in reality is really just an interface, with a bunch of different instances combined to provide the content. The cost is actually cheaper then other social platforms from the last 10 years+ like Facebook because in a way the cost for the “service” is divided by all the different instances hosted by volunteers,
plus it’s federated, not just a single site. The cost for hosting services are divided by instance so say one instance goes down, that doesn’t kill the entire program, although it would erase a portion of communities from Lemmy history in such a situation. Also it would be cheaper to host a Lemmy instance as the prices of hosting the instances that build up Lemmy are divided.
Sorry that I don't have an answer to your direct question, but
It doesn't necessarily need to be at a large scale, because of federation. The technical knowledge needed to admin an instance is a barrier to entry now, but probably can be improved. We could eventually see an ecosystem where your WoW guild (or your college buds, or your found family, or your fantasy football league, or equivalent smaller community) hosts an instance for its members. You can still participate in federated discussions, and the subscriptions of the instance could stay comparatively filtered to what's most important to the users of the instance.
You'll always have bigger generalist instances, but the flexibility you can have with really small and topical ones shouldn't be forgotten about imo, especially as the platforms/technologies mature.
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing "premium features" for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, "superlikes", gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don't deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
Besides funding you already have enough infighting, power mods, and admins shaping content according to political belief.
So tell years fun now everyone is going to defed against most instances and it’ll be even more of a pain in the ass to see content and it’s going to continue to get reposted across the instances you do interact with.
So like, lemmy will be here but it’s going to end up more like a traditional forum than interconnected communities.
People could advertise this as feature about using lemmy, that the probalility of getting comments are pretty high. particularly on Mastodon, because it’s certainly something people are looking for, after coming from platforms like Youtube that keep hiding your posts. I think it’s mostly the ease of use with the communities. Because on Mastodon, while a instance hosted may have a dedicated topic, posts aren’t typically organized. and it’s harder to find posts that interests you if people either use different hash tags then what you search for, and the added fact that you have to constantly search, while once you join a Lemmy community you just scroll the post feed In said community.
Non-profit social media isn't exactly healthy either.
I know beehaw is a relative safe haven, but venture to other instances in the fediverse and you'll find cesspits of toxicity that are as bad as it gets.
And given what my experiences with toxic positivity, cancelling and culture wars in minority run communities which should know better, I doubt beehaw doesn't have its fair share of toxicity too. Even if you manage to keep out the worst bigots, people who have been hurt or bullied, quite often end up hurting or bullying others.
From when I was asking about it, I think it’s only the instance admins that can see the details. It would be nice to have this information clearly outlined somewhere, so people know and aren’t surprised.
Recently had some people tell me that connect isn’t collapsing cross-posts so when a post is posted to multiple communities at the same time it floods the feed...
yeah ill probably have to make an issue on all of their repositories
its pretty much only supported by the main instance web frontends (lemmy-ui and pangora-ui) (been supported on lemmy-ui since before all of the apps were made)
currently recommended in programming.dev to cross post to as many communities as you can to give content to the lower activity communities and since there tends to be a lot of overlap with topics but thats conflicting with current app behaviours
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?
That’s because, currently, the community stats that you see in the sidebar are only from your instance – community stats are currently not federated. Afaik, federated community stats are going to be implemented in 0.19.
Oh no ... (jlai.lu)
An unbiased comparison of linux distributions' setup (sh.itjust.works)
If linux distributions were tools. (sh.itjust.works)
As of now I have approximately 1 user. (lemmy.world)
wayland, not even once (gist.github.com)
It's not fair (startrek.website)
(sorry if anyone got this post twice. I posted while Lemmy.World was down for maintenance, and it was acting weird, so I deleted and reposted)
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
Why does lemmy seem better for engagement and conversation then (I meant than) Mastodon
On average if I make a post on Mastodon whether I get a comment, and a continued conversation is either hit or miss....
Best way to bookmark lemmy communities in a web browser (lemmy.world)
If you’re like me, you would join one Lemmy instance, and then join a community by one of the following ways,...
Nepal bans TikTok and says it disrupts social harmony (apnews.com)
If you can create a Lemmy instance and federate, you can shovel data about every vote linked to an account
I’ve created this post: sh.itjust.works/post/8898162...
Connect does not collapse cross-posts into the same post in the post feed
Recently had some people tell me that connect isn’t collapsing cross-posts so when a post is posted to multiple communities at the same time it floods the feed...
The user numbers in Lemmy communities don't add up (jemmy.jeena.net)
2 days ago (see 2) I posted something into the !programmer_humor community which got almost 1000 upvotes (see 1) while the user numbers for the last week are at 131 (see 3), this doesn’t add up. How can 131 users upvote almost 1000 times?