Hey, so it’s not jerboa based and I ended up pushing it back a few weeks, but I’m now looking for beta testers on Android if you’re interested

As for the name, I think I’m going with Luna for several reasons, a big one being that someone suggested it and Flemmy was the only name I could think of beforehand

I’m posting updates to !flemmy@lemmy.world for now, if you’re interested I’ll be posting instructions for the beta soon.

Whether you’re interested or not I’d love to get feedback. I’m good with data and UX flow, but I mostly just comment - I need to learn how other people want to use Lemmy

That ship has sailed… So many sites don’t actually change pages, they just load different data - it’s way faster and looks better

Problem is, the back button takes you off the site no matter where you are, so now you can change the URL and change the history through code to have the best of both worlds

Then, there’s the people who do it badly, and there’s the people who think “hey, if you need pro StarCraft level clicking speed to back out of my site, maybe for some reason that will make them decide to stay”

By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.

Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”

They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative

Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back

Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south

Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it

And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.

They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.

We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible

Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.

Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive

Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers

Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals

Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.

They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference

Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS

Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it

And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us

They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society

It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…

As a late millennial and a programmer, I’ve got you.

So when you request a web page, before anything else, the server gives you a 3 digit status code.

100s means you asked for metadata

200s mean it went ok

300s means you need to go somewhere else (like for login, or because we moved things around)

400s mean you messed up

500s mean I messed up

So this is in the 400s. Each specific code means something - you’ve probably seen 404, which means you asked for a page that isn’t there. And maybe 405, which means you’re not allowed to see this

418 means you asked for coffee, but I’m a teapot

I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn

But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media

Running a server isn’t that expensive. Someone did a breakdown, and found the cost is around $0.20/user/year. Their math might have been a little off, but it’s in the ballpark based on the back of the envelope math I use to see if something scales

That’s well within casual donation amounts.

But, that assumes admins and mods are volunteers- maybe they get a few bucks now and again, but their time is a far bigger factor than server costs

There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?

I’m actually working on this haha.

It’s definitely a v2 feature, but it’s in the works

Probably something with sundials. ~6am going up to 12 at noon, then going 1-6pm if night and day are equal (I’ve never actually seen a sundial and I’m sure people got clever with them as time went on)

I mean a sundial doesn’t even track hours so much as daylight before and after noon

What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further q

What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further

What in an account? It’s not the name or karma, because we have display names and no karma (I think it should be per community, but discussions on if we even want it are ongoing, maybe someone will come up with a really clever idea)

If it’s your subs, saved posts/settings, and even getting notifications for responses to your posts/comments I’m building all that into an app. The only thing you obviously couldn’t do is edit - but an account migration method in the federation spec is in the works

But I love decentralization, I think it’s the answer to everything, and it needs to go further.

All important data should live on your device and be updated, and can be applied to a different account (even on a different server)

You should be able to talk to multiple servers at the same time. This one has me stuck in refactoring… But I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down, I just need sleep.

You should be able to do not just filtering, but sorting and discovery at the device level - I’ve got custom filters working, someone asked for a keyword filter, and I thought “that sounds like a bad idea, let’s try it out”. You can also go server by server and do searches, then if you like something, you hit subscribe and it’ll tell your server to start pulling it in

I’ve also got plans to use voting to look at what communities and users you like most, and show you what they like. All without the data leaving your phone.

Centralization makes everything way easier, so it’s a constant temptation. But we’ll get more and more decentralized as time goes on… I’ll drag the fediverse in that direction kicking and screaming myself if I have to… This is too important to just let it become just

Luckily, a lot of the devs building for Lemmy feel that way - at every layer, we’re asking what we can do to take it further

Here’s the other thing - he’s maybe a millionaire, not a billionaire. That’s middle class, maybe upper middle class if he’s got other income

This is a normal person who just lost his job with little notice because of a greedy company, and, to add insult to injury, now has to come up with money for refunds out of the blue

I know I wouldn’t feel good taking back that money, whether he can afford it or not

I think it’s more just because we’re early adopters and the first wave of refugees.

We’re building something here - and right now, for some it’s a new home, for some of us this is something big - a place that resists monetization. This isn’t just the fresh new version of social media, built by cool people who have the best intentions and a vision (I think most of them did, at least initially)

Admins go bad, already some of the instances I’m on have people starting to look at not just paying for servers, but making a profit. And if they can live off the donations - fine, more power to them.

But when someone comes knocking with a bag of money, what are they going to do? They can sell us out, but they can’t go far before we leave… What do we miss out on? The content will either follow or we’re missing out on content elsewhere.

And we can mitigate it further - too many talented people care too much to let this idea die. We’re going to face difficult times, but it’s a new ephemeral Internet built on top of the one stolen from us - it doesn’t start or end with a reddit clone.

And I think that’s why we care - because this time is different. It can’t go bad the way everything else does. It relies on no one, and it’s built from all of us

This place is ours. No kings, no masters, no capitol, no capital

Yeah, people will do something just for fun, to profit personally, or to spite someone

The moment they realize someone is making money off it, they start getting FOMO - humans are very loss adverse. No one wants to miss out on free money

But what if they had turned around and said, “fine, we’ll start hiring you guys. You’ll get paid hourly, but you’ll have to do the proper paperwork, be given guidelines from corporate, reviewed on your performance regularly, and you might be relocated to undermoderated subs”?

Most of them wouldn’t be into it - they don’t actually want to work for Reddit, they just don’t like feeling like someone else is sitting back and living off their work while they get nothing. The reality is, they’re not doing a job, and they generally don’t want to be (there’s a difference between a job and work, especially work that benefits others vs a job protecting the cash cow)

When someone does a service for you, you act grateful and offer them lemonade and gift cards, you don’t try to turn it into a job, and you sure as hell don’t break their tools and ask when they’ll get back to work

On the plus side, I’m about to open the beta that handles both just fine (plus a lot of features no one else is doing yet). The deadline I for myself is Saturday when the Reddit clients go down.

Unfortunately it was built by someone who lurks and comments, and I realized even though merging feeds from accounts on different servers is going to be awesome, other people like to post and I need to stop getting off track

The stress of the timeline is starting to get to me and I’m terrified no one is going to give it a chance, but I’ve fixed most of the things that drove me nuts in jerboa… That should count for something, right?