I agree on the global forum aspect of Twitter being the reason it was exciting for public figures and journalists, but you get waaay more genuine interactions from normal (techy) people on Mastodon. It may feel a bit dead when you start out because there is no algorithm to feed you content, but after a while of using it you get a lot of interesting opinions and feedback on things you post.

https://github.com/agola-io/agola

Maybe, but I ended up with Woodpecker for now.

You might want to look into: https://github.com/lab132/buildbot-gitea

GoToSocial works without problems on Podman, they probably just meant that they can’t give technical support for it.

👍 for hosting a xmpp server. Next step is to get a real domain name!

You must have last used XMPP more than a decade ago, since none of these issues still exist (except on Pidgin which also hasn’t been updated since a decade).

And XMPP is also not a “chatty protocol, and wasteful of network bandwidth” at all. In fact it is using significantly less bandwidth than Matrix and works on extremely shitty connections. It is basically the exact opposite of what you say.

They even have their own fake crypto-coin!

This is like a full set of bullshit bingo on one page 🤦‍♂️

The problem is that you are the ideologue but fail to realize that. Capitalism is an ideology and a very harmful one.

As for those investments, lets see, but I don’t expect much to come from those.

You are mixing up two topics here. If someone wants to experiment with a local only algorithmic feed that’s fine, but I can practically guarantee that this will never be enough to convince people to switch from TikTok and the like.

And the other topic is about commercialization. You are the one stuck in the past thinking that is the only way for the Fediverse to succeed. Quite on the contrary, if anyone seriously tried that it would fail quickly and just result in burned investments and a lot of goodwill towards the Fediverse lost.

There is absolutely nothing stopping the personalization algorithms to run on-device or delegated to a separate service from the video feed.

But that is not how the TikTok recommendation algorithm works and doing it locally only would be a very poor substitute most likely, as it seem to also recommend what other people with a similar behavior pattern have liked. And the same algorithm is used to identify suitable targets for advertisers, so the two are basically inseparable.

provided we get to a place Fediverse is relevant enough to attract the attention of some small business, media channels, institutions, etc.

That’s like saying the community garden needs to be relevant enough to attract a seed shop and a fast-food stand etc. And a few weeks later there is no more community garden but rather a strip mall owned by the local oligopolists renting out booths to entrepreneurs. That is just not helpful at all, because it destroys the very foundation of what the Fediverse tries to achieve.

Have you actually talked to some people using TikTok? Yes, they do like the personalized algorithmic feed, and that is inseperable from the surveillance part, and they certainly don’t want to pay for it either.

The ones with hubris are people like you that think they can turn the Fediverse into the next big thing. Of course people already on the fediverse are going try raining on your parade 🤷

See long argument above. It exists and is viable for millions of people. Once people decide they want something other than corporate social media, the Fediverse is there. There is no point in trying to make the Fediverse a copy of the corporate social media to appeal to users that see no reason to switch. The Fediverse is relevant regardless of the size, because it proves a real alternative is possible and viable.

You sound like a reverse Tankie 😅 No proof of anything other than your ortodox economic believes, and when confronted with the living proof of the opposite (the Fediverse) you just claim that it can’t and will never exist 🤦

Millions of people are using it every month, and it seems to do just fine despite contstant claims since many years that it can’t survive…

I just wish that next time we don’t see someone as “toxic” just because they were not willing to put up with all these silly rules and rituals that everyone seems to follow without questioning.

Something, something Chestertons fence…

These “rituals” are vital for the continued existence of the Fediverse. Without a clear anti-capitalist and anti-oligopolist stance it will be co-opted and destroyed like many similar efforts that came before. You are being very naive if you can’t see that.

Many of these email providers only exist as a less bad alternative but compatible with Gmail etc. And the oligopol could shut them down any time as their primary service is sending emails to the oligopol.

What you are proposing is basically to make the Fediverse a small managed opposition to Meta’s Threads, which I am sure Zuckerberg would love.

But that is not what the Fediverse tries to be and neither does it aim to become mainstream. We are doing prefigurative infrastructure building here. If people want to join, great. If not, also no problem. But if society decides to finally get rid of this capitalist hellscape, then the Fediverse will be there and ready to use.

You can argue all you want about definitions, but that doesn’t change the fact that these companies are at the wim of the large oligopolies and pose absolutly no threat to them, nor do they even want to because their business indirectly depends on these oligopoles existing.

Now you are contradicting yourself. Sure, there are survival niches for small cockroach companies in the shawdow of the large FOSS based oligopolies, but that is the status quo and no improvement at all.

Synapse has become open-core and the possible alternatives are either abandoned or are currently in a really unclear state. And due to how Matrix federation works, it is quite difficult to change anything later and if you are unhappy with the setup you have basically burned a domain and need to start fresh on another. If you just want a chat server I would rather suggest to set up a XMPP server with a Slidge.im Matrix bridge.

That said: there are easy to use official Docker containers for Synapse, and you just need a redirect in your reverse-proxy for some sub-directories to put it on the same domain than something else. There are also some other, more complex ways to do it, but just redirecting the subdirectories is the easiest.

There are plenty of examples of monopolies built on FOSS technology. Especially in social media it is more about network effects and having enough funds to buy up any potential competitors. Facebook could be FOSS and it would not change anything.

The culture to expect this for “free” is not exclusive to the fediverse, and while it has been exploited by adtech companies to build large surveillance advertisement monopolies, it is by itself not wrong for people to expect that basic services are not held behind a paywall. It just needs another organisational model to function, and comercialisation is not going to work.

And besides those general considerations, your healty cottage industry is a pipe dream. Digital services have a fundamentally different economic basis that leads to huge efficiency gains at scale. If you do not actively work against that, any cottage industry will quickly consolidate around a few big players and you will basically have replicated the current system.

To quote from one of your links:

Funding is like oxygen. Organisms that do not have circulatory systems can only grow to the size of insects.

Yet insects are by far the most populous group of animals on earth and often excell in cooperation and some form huge meta-organisms.

If the idea that drives the Fediverse wants to succeed we need to build 60.000 volunteer run Pixelfed etc. instances, and that is not an unrealistic number at all, but it takes time.

You can’t shortcut this process with more funding and commercial companies, because if you try, you end up with something completely different and most likely with another monopoly.

Could you explain what makes Calendly different from the hundreds of online calendar solutions that exists and can often be self-hosted? I never used it, so it is hard to make a recommendation for an alternative.