rglullis

“If you think sex workers ‘sell their bodies,’ but coal miners do not, your view of labor is clouded by your moralistic view of sexuality.”

If you are going to start a conversation by attacking a strawman, then I really will not get into it.

acting in commercial porn is just as normal and unremarkable as any other job

If this is your idea of being "sex positive" then I really do not want to get into this argument. I can guess this will quickly play out to any objection as "pearl clutching" and I will stick to the point that your attitude is completely dehumanizing and that there is nothing "positive" about reducing sex to the mechanical/physical act.

Like I said in the first comment, if you feel so strongly about this, go ahead and create your own and see how far it goes. When you start putting some Skin In The Game you will get more credibility or at least accept that things are Just Not That Simple.

advocating for them to be treated on absolutely equal footing; they're specially marked so that people who don't

You lamented the fact that unlogged users can not see it and that they can not be found as easily. This is the same as "make it available to the public without any type of check".

It's treating sexuality as something toxic

Sexuality != Porn, and "toxicity" is dose-dependent. Eating a bit of broccoli is good for you. Too much at once and you get thyroid dysfunction.

There are plenty of things that are good and normal, but need to be discussed/presented with a proper context and (most importantly) people need to have a better understanding of the potential bad consequences if it is abused or corrupted.

You don't see young people destroying their lives because they were promised they could make a lot of money by knitting sweaters or working as electricians, but cases of vulnerable women who regret getting into sex work are infinite.

Do you think the availability of porn within an online space has no effect on what kind of culture develops there?

Of course it does have an effect, but there is a difference between "can be found" and "should be encouraged to be treated on equal footing as any other community forum".

Much like "absolute freedom of speech" platforms that inevitably end up catering to people who want to say only repulsive things without repercussion, what do you think will happen if you create an online space and put a big billboard saying "here you will always be free to share your NSFW content"?

Content discovery of porn should not be as easy and it should not be trivialized under the pretense of "sex positivity". One can have an absolutely open mind about sex and sexuality while still wanting to keep a clear boundary of when/how/whom to talk about it.

The problem is not code. The problem is that no one wants to take this responsibility. Every one wants to talk about supportive they are on sex positivity until some men in uniform knocks on their doors because they are running a website that is available for minors all around the world.

Also, I don't even want to get in the discussion of "sex positivity" being associated with "easily available porn". Like you said, porn is easy to find and I really doubt that the someone who is savvy enough to use Lemmy would have trouble to know where it is.

If this is so important to you, you are still very much free to start your own instance and see how far it goes.

Yeah, I think that every product that innovates on the hardware fails to bring quality software to match.

If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.

It wouldn't be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.

centralization of domain names under you.

The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.

Can you name any advantage??

• Less concerns about political fights among "user" instances affecting communication among communities
• Less tribalism regarding "what community is the canonical one". Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think "ok, that one will be a good entry point".
• Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
• Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.

hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…

As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.

My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).

Could all of you go outside for a little bit, touch grass, smile at a stranger?

Sometimes I get angry at myself for wasting my time in pointless discussions, but this is next-level wankery. If you know that hexbear is a pig hut, don't come here to complain that you are full of mud and pig shit in your face.

Reported as off-topic.

Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.

This is not an accurate representation of what I've been defending:

users should pay 30$ a year to get access to professionally-managed instances

"Should" is not the right verb, and you are omitting the context. What I have been saying for the past two years already is that if people on the Fediverse don't realize that there are real costs to develop the software and operate the servers, it will never be able to grow, and if you doubt that just see how growth has completely stalled in relation to better funded alternatives like Threads, Bluesky and even Farcaster.

This is not about paying for my servers. It can be about running your own, from home. It can be about getting together with your real life friends and sharing a server. It can be about convincing the IT department of your company to set up a server for their social media.

What I am saying, simply put, is "you'll get what you pay for". I'm saying that those that want the Fediverse to grow need to make significant investment on it. Your idea of "material support" is to "pay for the cost of running the servers", and this is just taking all the work from the developers, instance admins and moderators for granted.

(And no, "I also spend time bringing content and participating, so it should be counted" is not true, because this is just standard usage of the application being developed)

we should centralize content based on a few of those professionally-managed instance

Again, not true. The topic-specific instances are not meant to be a source of revenue for Communick. I never said that I was planning to charge access to those instances, and I never said anything about pushing them to some corporate system.

based on the thread from 4 days ago, no admins has jumped in and offered to help

@[email protected] has already expressed support of the idea and @[email protected] is at least considering it.

The thread was not meant to get input from the admins. The thread was meant to gauge interest from the communities about using it.

There is also issues of "opinion as fact".

the cost of these instances is around 6500€ per year setting up an infrastructure that costs 1700 € per year on domain names alone is unreasonable

First, I don't know where you got the 6500€ number. I said 1700€ for the domains + 2400€ (200€/month) for the servers. My operating costs are ~4000€/year. 4000€ per year for 18 instances amounts to less than 20€/month/instance.

Second, on the occasion that these instances became a more integral part of the Fediverse, it would not be difficult to raise enough money to keep them running. For comparison, the folks from LW are raising ~950€/month on patreon alone and if you go by the rule of thumb that ~2% of users contribute to their instances, the ~360€/month needed for these servers could be raised by less than 20k active users that decided to give 1€/month.

Thirdly, domains like nba.space and nfl.community are valuable. They can help with SEO, they provide legitimacy and (should the community agree) they could be one of the first places to try alternative monetization methods to fund the development of all the Fediverse.

Lastly - and without offense the fact that I have to explain this to you is a strong indicator that you are either very young or financially illiterate - you are hung up on the nominal prices, but all these costs are business expenses. They are sort of a sunk cost already and/or they can be used to deduct from my tax bill.

All in all, this whole part of your argument can be summarized as "I think it is expensive, and I wouldn't pay for that, so I don't think others would/should be interested in it". Your opinion is, just, you know, your opinion, man....

having one small team per instance instead of a centralized consortium managing all of these instances seems healthier. The local team manages their instances, they make it grow organically, people see that the instance is reliable, they start trusting it and establish communities on it.

How has that worked out for the people on kbin, or feddit.de, or FMHY?

The question here is not about "small teams" vs "centralized groups". I think the crux of the matter is:

• How much do we really want the Fediverse to grow and become a mainstream social media platform?
• If we want it to grow, where are we going to get resources to support its development?
• If we really want it to grow, how fast do we want it grow? If it's too slow it risks becoming irrelevant (see Bluesky), too fast and it risks becoming a chaos that is not recognizable by the original members (see web3 being taken by get-rich-quick scammers)

It certainly is one of the factors.

We missed a lot of opportunities during Rexxit because Redditors did not know where to go and could not easily find the communities they were interested on, except for the very popular ones.

Then we had the period where people were saying "oh, just send everyone to LW", which did not really help in terms of discovery and basically painted a target on their backs, not to mention that it caused such a problematic dynamic in the federation: given it is the instance with the most people and the most communities, it generates a lot of activities and makes it almost impossible for instances that are away from Europe to keep up.

So, the Lemmy network is a bit capped at the current size. It will only be able to grow 2x if the majority of users end up on LW, and the more users on LW, the bigger the problem gets.

Having instances focused exclusively on being the home of communities would remove the bottleneck and reduce the load on any single instance. It would remove the "which instance to join" problem and it would bring a more clear migration path.