rglullis

I did the demo for CareerCupid and the AP toolkit. AMA.

The problem then is that by responding, you’re engaging with it which typically helps it spread in the algorithms*

But then the solution is to fix "the algorithms". One more reason that I should say we should get rid of "votes" is that they are an artificial constraint created by the closed social media platforms that gate-keep and limit user choice. If "the alogorithms" are plentiful, easy to customize, and chosen by the user, then everyone is able to rank and sort the data as they see fit.

Removing downvotes and banning users who disagree is the typical cult strategy

The only ones with power to remove contents are moderators and admins. If moderation is transparent (as it should be), then it is easy to figure out if mods are are acting in good faith and according to the interests with the community. Then it is up to us as users to figure out if we should continue participating in that community or leave it behiind.

you can’t downvote just wrong information anymore.

If "wrong information" can be properly defined, then either you challenge it (by responding, calling it out) or by reporting it. Downvoting it just because it you think it is not appropriate is a recipe for creating echo chambers.

Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?

Making them private is absolute idiotic. People participating in a discussion forum are willing to engage in a public conversation, if you are not willing to respond in public, then don't respond at all. And if you think that the original comment is in bad faith or harmful to the community, report it and move on.

Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?

"Votes" are not real votes. It's just a terrible misnomer for "Liking" and "Disliking". I think we should get rid of votes altogether and use the real vocabulary.

I'd also would like a system where users could define their own scoring algorithm, and I would like to assign different weights depending on the person and the topic/community. I for one think that downvotes (dislikes) should only be counted if you are a member of the community and if you have made a positive contribution to the discussion.

What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?

I'd like to be able to follow people just to see what they are liking/commenting on. Also, given that this is a discussion forum, I wonder whether we could build a wiki-like system where people could annotate parts of a comment/post and challenge/elaborate/investigate specific parts of an statement. This could be used either for a "Change My View" style of discussion or even full-on adversarial collaboration projects.

Again, I'm sorry. This is not "optimism" but baseless wishful thinking.

If you want to talk about actual strategies to get people to see the value of a free Internet and how to educate them, I'm all ears. But I'm not interested in continuing the conversation if you are just arguing what you wish would happen.

But not just try and see what happens?

• Because it has been tried before, and there are no significant results to show.
• Because these types of changes take time and effort that would be better spent elsewhere.
• Because it is solving the wrong problem. The problem is not "how to unclog the flow of money". Sending money around has never been easier. The problem is not the flow of money, the problem is that most people are not willing to give money for something unless they absolutely have to, so there is not a lot of money to be sent around.

I'm sorry. When I first saw your blog post I thought you were closer to what I've been saying for three years already , but it seems that you don't have an actionable proposal.

Right, so the problem is not solved and you are talking about "solutions" that have been tried before and do not work.

You know that quote about "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"? This is what is happening here.

Expecting to fund commons infrastructure through donation do not work in the long run. It's that simple. You can try to come up with all sorts of flashy gimmicks to make the issue more visible,.but the issue will continue to exist.

I still feel like you are talking about one "ideal" scenario, but all your examples fall short of it. I'd really have a hard time to see anyone working on any of the projects from the FSF that is "worthy of envy".

bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json

Seems like an optimization that is not really needed. The data format is not really the bottleneck, there are ActivityPub relays that can send messages in bulk and ActivityPub is built on LinkedData, which means that there plenty of powerful libraries in most languages that can parse and produce JSON in a way that keeps application developers with a consistent semantics. The more people try to change the data format in the sake of "efficiency", the less portable and useful it would be.

and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?)

Yes and no. Most of the current software do authentication by using HTTP Message Signatures, so after you fetch the actor's public key every request is authenticated by seeing an HTTP header, which makes it no different most common authentication schemes.

Yeah, I am 100% convinced that we need to rethink AP to make it less dependent on servers.

mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency.

It is not a matter of efficiency, but solely of how AP works. All it takes is someone one an server to to follow a community for that server to receive every vote/post/comment, while to get a whole conversation thread on Mastodon you'd need to be on the same server as the original poster or your server would need to have at least one person following every server involved in the conversation.

Let's make a quick case study?

Take a look at Mastodon's Patreon and their OpenCollective page. The largest project in the Fediverse gets 16500€/month from Patreon + $10k/year on OC, and that money is meant to support an instance with ~ 280 thousand active users (mastodon.social), another with 9.600 active users (mastodon.online) + the salary of ~5 developers. And we are not even counting the tens of moderators who are doing a lot of stressful work and have to deal with all sorts of issues that arise from being the largest instance out there.

An instance like mastodon.social should be pulling at least $1.5M/year in donations to make this work for the admins and moderators alone. Double that if we also used to fund the work of the developers. Which means that they would need an average donation of $4-$8 per user/year. Now, going by Jerry's number where he says around 4% of his users donate, this would mean that each donor would have to contribute $100-$200 every year.

And this is for the flagship instance, which has all their "please donate" narrative (deservedly) on their favor. Imagine how much harder would it be for other instances. Do you really think that we would be getting 4% of every instance contributing $100/year, or 8% contributing $50/year, or 20% contributing $20/year?

Now, let's compare with a different funding strategy, where we have independent service providers providing a service. Each one of them is working with different levels of investment, ROI expectations, etc. None of these instances would be getting hundreds of thousands of users (which makes operational costs per user higher), but at least their growth would only come if they have enough people willing to pay the asking price, and none of these users would be expected to pay $100-$200/year.

For example: my magical number with Communick is to get 10 thousand customers, each paying paying $29/year. That's $290k. Minus a reasonable salary for me ($180k/year), that's $110k. Minus my operational costs (let's say I can make things run with $25k/year) that's $85k. Minus my 20% pledge to the underlying Fediverse projects on the profits (20% of $85k is $17k). The remaining $68k would be used to reinvest in the business, hire people to help, etc.

Can you realistically make the case where someone with ~10k users could be getting $15k/month in donations? Not as an one-off kickstarter (like the Pixelfed devs did), but consistently enough that people can actually make long-term plans around this revenue, treat it like an actual job?

Do you think that all that is missing for the "open registration instances" (the .world servers, the infosec servers, fosstodon, hachyderm.io...) is "transparency"? All these people are already doing very good work and they are transparent about their costs. Do you think if the admins start also including other costs on the list, that the donations will keep coming forever?