Open source or GTFO. :)

Seriously, Lemmy is AGPL. Any client you do and any functionality you build on top of it must be AGPL as well.

Now I am confused, are you able to make changes to the Lemmy codebase? A fork? If you want to find a way to fund development, why not just work with the current team?

As a concept, it could be a valid approach. But you need to put actual numbers to see if things make sense:

• What would be the monthly membership fee?
• What would be a reasonable SLA? If there is an outage on a Friday night, are the members okay if they wait until Monday to get it back someone online?
• What do you think is a good hour rate to pay for an admin?
• What should you pay for someone to stay on call?
• Can I run bots? How many? Does each bot count as a separate account?

I think you’ll see that as soon as you start asking people to put money and to feel like they “own” it, the demands will increase and so will the costs.

For reference, the one coop I am somewhat familiar is from Mastodon: cosocial.ca. Each member pays CA$50/year for an account. I think this is particularly too expensive. There are other cheaper “commercial” alternatives that charge less:

• omg.lol offers mastodon and some other services, for $20/year
• mastodon.green offers accounts at $2/month
• Communick offers Mastodon/Lemmy/Funkwhale/Matrix accounts for $29/year (Disclosure, I’m founder)

Regarding “how to fund it”. This is an open source project, so you can sponsor me via github, but the best way you can help is by signing up to my “proper” hosting service.

How does 2 way mirroring work?

That will depend on a few things:

• If it’s an user that has “converted” via alien.top’s portal, we can work as a real reddit client and send message on behalf of the user.
• If the lemmy user is not on alien.top but wants to enable a two-way bridge, then we will have to do an authentication dance and send messages with passcodes to both reddit and lemmy.
• If the user does not want a bridge, we can still send a message to the reddit thread via another bot.

The last one would be the easiest to implement, but I’m avoiding releasing this because it might be taken down due to spam.

They are definitely not appearing as bots in Connect.

If the accounts from alien.top you are seeing are not marked as bots, then it means that you interacted with an actual person who has taken over their account. ;)

i dont agree this is the solution.

Then how about help and come up with something better?

will not waste time interacting with bots.

Then don’t interact with the bots. You can, e.g, write the comment on Lemmy and send a DM to the original redditor, inviting them to join the instance/community. I did that to dozens of people already.

without labelling them as such

All accounts are marked as bots.

What is the point of this one way mirroring?

The tool is to help reddit users migrate to Lemmy. By going to the portal, reddit users can “take over” their reddit mirror account and get started on Lemmy already subscribed to the same communities they subscribed on reddit.

There is no point having a discussion with a bot that cannot respond.

I’m also working on two-way mirroring, but even without it is already very useful… Do you know the “rule” of 90/9/1? On every social media network, 90% of the users are just lurking. 9% participate in the discussion occasionally and 1% are prolific participants. In my case, thanks to fediverser, I managed to unsub from almost 40 subreddits I was subscribed, but I managed to bring this number to 2 (/r/fediverse and /r/redditalternatives)

As soon as users realise, they are going to just leave.

I’m not going to say which to avoid the Streisand effect, but I’m seeing some communities that already have interesting conversations between organic users which could have only have started because of some comment thread that has been mirrored.

Gitlab is open source, but some features are only available in their Enterprise Edition. As the name suggests, unless you are looking for an alternative for a large company, the open source “Community” Edition is enough for all your needs.

If not, why?

How many man-hours of work were already spent in the development of Photoshop, its plugins, etc? How much has that cost? On what scale of time was that spread around? How much money have designers put into them by buying licenses (now subscriptions) of Adobe’s suite?

If you want an alternative for Linux that can match Photoshop, you need to be willing to support the R&D costs that have been paid off by Adobe throughout the decades of its development. Are you willing to do it?

The messages would still go through WhatsApp, but they are e2ee anyway. The part where it would protect you is that you wouldn’t have the app installed on your device, so Facebook won’t be able to get your location, access your contact list, etc.

WhatsApp

Though I’d rather recommend you just get out of WhatsApp entirely (it’s still owned by Meta after all), one way to go would be by using a matrix client (like element) with the WhatsApp bridge.

I get it that they need to find a way to fund their R&D team.

I get that there is also some people willing to pay top-dollar for some specific features which can not be had on commodity phones Linux-based, fully assembled in the US, etc. Which is going to be impossible to fulfill at scale.

What I don’t get is: why can’t they offer something that makes this explicit? I for one have no interest in a $2k phone, but I would gladly give them $50 per month and in exchange I’d get the right to participate in some periodic (monthly, quarterly, yearly?) dutch-style auction when they had a new update to their phone. Perhaps a percentage of the money that I had given could be used to pay for the device, etc.

Can you please stop with the unnecessary snark and this silly attempt at dick-measuring? Are you upset at something?

Are you unironically implying that a site with a backend that has multiple servers stood up to spread the load won’t have tremendously better capacity, redundancy…

No. I am saying that the majority of websites out there don’t need to pay the costs or worry about this.

Good engineering is about understanding trade-offs. We can be talking all day about the different strategies to have 4, 5 or 6 nines of availability, but all that would be pointless if the conversation is not anchored in how much will be the cost of implementing and operating such a solution.

Lemmy - like all other social media software - does not need that. There is nothing critical about it. No one dies if the server goes offline for a couple of minutes in the month. No business will stop making money if we take the database down to do a migration instead of using blue-green deployments. Even the busiest instances are not seeing enough load to warrant more servers and are able to scale by simply (1) fine-tuning the database (which is the real bottleneck) and (2) launching more processes.

Anyone that is criticizing Lemmy because “it can not scale out” is either talking out of their ass or a bad engineer. Possibly both.

Dude, I think you’re just ignorant of how web hosting works.

I run a managed hosting service for Mastodon and Lemmy, but yeah…

Every single site you visit is hosted on probably dozens or more servers so that it can load balance or guarantee better uptime.

Hacker News: one single FreeBSD box. Not even a database.

Also, your cargo-cult is showing… talking about “load balance” as a guarantee of uptime is the same as justifying using Mongo because it is webscale

I’m doing my part!!

Why not?

• Because it creates an unnecessary incentive re-centralize the social network under a handful of instances
• Because it leads to drama and power struggles (beehaw defederating from other big instances, claiming issues with moderation)
• Because after a certain size, there is no real community, no common identity, no shared values and principles.
• Because it makes the system (the fediverse) more vulnerable.
• Because it is not sustainable in the long run
• Because it is not needed. Even if one server has an incredibly popular community, it can be followed from remote instances.

the instance should be able to provide capabilities to host those users.

Why? And who pays for that?

I’d argue the exact opposite. We should strive for more instances and for Lemmy’s userbase to be spread around. The fact that is scaling out (more instances) is easier than scaling up (beefier servers) is a feature, not a bug.

When us older folks say “Anything you put on the public internet should be considered public and recorded forever”, it’s because of that.

What I really hope to see is some client-side algorithms that can let you track who vote-voted-for-what. This way, you (your client) could ignore downvotes if you detect brigading or rings and it could boost a particular post if it happened to be upvoted by a friend of yours.