When is a large instance too large?
The bigger threat to ActivityPub right now is the admin's credit card or legal liability due to hosted content. The most successful open source projects either become or attract commercial projects. IMO, the hobbiest operators will be the downfall of ActivityPub. The hobbiest operators are subject to life happening. I would love to see the number of Fediverse instances that have blinked in and out of existence.
I see, you want this thread to be an echo chamber? Got it.
The niavity in this debate is not realizing that most successful open source projects need both commercial sponsor and operators. When the current admin of lemm.ee decides that he's done, or has financial troubles then this community goes away.
The problem in this debate is between open source and open choice. Open source purist are often anti choice. If you want to use a closed source, proprietary system, that is your choice. The key aspect of federation isn't the open source (its great) but the open choice -- you can choose your own server (I have my own, FWIW) or some random tech bro or some evil Corp marketeer, or Meta, the point is choice. For each user, there are compelling arguments and compelling reasons for why someone would choose Lemmy or Threads or whatever, the value is in the choice.
So in the demand for our SABDFL to make a choice, we are in effect saying that we want to restrict the choice. Why do we care if there is a great community on Meta or that a great. Community on our server is attracting a broader community? Walled gardens are walled gardens. So I have to ask, what walled garden is the community asking for: open source and closed community? Sound like hell to me.
Take an upvote, but I think the situation I'd very different from the XMPP and the office standards or even kerberos. In each of those cases, it was a standard.
For the XMPP case, XMPP use for Google was primary business users. The XMPP case ignores the rise of other, more convient, more engaged communication like Facebook Messenger, discord and free text messaging. For the open standard of OOXML, Microsoft's aim was to sell Office. And for Kerberos, the AD changed were driven by business reasons. Regular kerberos is insane to admin, and Microsoft made it easy; it doesnt help that Novell's eDitectiry failed.
With Federation, the story is different. The engagement isn't like XMPP of connecting to people you know, or the security reasons of AD or even the standards of OOXML. In a sense, Federation is more like DNS or a web server: it's just about connecting communities.
This comment is the one we should be talking about. We all lack empathy, at least politically and socially.
Plenty of people who have had children and raised them are against paying school taxes after their kids leave school. The number of times I have heard Grand parents talk about unfair it is that they have to pay taxes on schools is insane. Source: lived in a community where the average age was 72.
The beauty of this is the pendatic fixation on the definition of profanity. Sure, no one is going to think OMG is profanity but it means the definition.
Most underrated comment
Conversation with right, left, middle, whatever are only productive if based on a principalled ideology. I disagree with the NeoCons of Bush and Cheney, but at least there is an ideology to work with. MAGA, on the other hand is defined by no principals other than authoritarian aims of "winning" where "winning" is making the other side mad.
The post truth world we live in makes this hard, though. Right now there is no shared truth, and with varied truthinesses out there, it makes the conversation hard. Using flat earthers as an example, the sheer rejection of math and science is astounding; having a principalled conversation is hard when the foundations are different.
And with 24hr news, breaking news, and global news, and only so much news worthy content, there is an incentive to come with with differentiation and that creates eco chambers. News Max isn't going to bring on a CNN contributor (and vice versa) to challenge their views.
I was just wondering if I should make an impulse buy for my Mach-E