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)

No flair. What you need is:

<post title> @community@instance
<line break>
<post body>

Edit: to those downvoting: If you think what I am saying is wrong, how about giving a better answer?

Here is a Mastodon Post and here is how it ended up in Lemmy (The NSFW tag was because I mistakenly tried to add the title as a content warning)

Embrace ActivityPub and use the /outbox endpoint directly.

Somewhat related: would you be interested in joining https://fediverser.network? The project is meant to help people migrate from Reddit to Lemmy automatically. People need to authenticate once with their Reddit credentials, and the system finds the best instance for them and looks at their list of subscribed subreddits to automatically find and follow the most relevant Fediverse communities.

The project is now at the point where more people can join and help spread out the word to Redditors, so the idea now is to get more people there to sign up (to help fill the crowdsource map of community recommendations) and to get more Reddit moderators who might be interested in helping their communities to move out of there.

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Fair enough. I think I’d rather be more mindful of what “mode” I am browsing around. I stick with only the subscribed communities, and whenever I am in the mood for something new, I take some time to browse around the instances to see what’s out there. Browsing by all and then blocking all the crappy stuff seems to me like a constant effort with very little potential reward.

wouldn’t it be easier to stop browsing by all and only see the things you want to see?

Wait, how many communities do you need to block every day for this to be an issue?

You know that you can configure minio to only serve images for authenticated requests, right?

Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you have a very good reason to do so.

It looks like your cloudflared is trying to reach the Lemmy UI directly? What is the URL your tunnel is configured to reach?

I might be wrong, but I believe that lemmy-ui default port is 1234, not 1236.

Can you get the the backend to work? If you make a request to <your domain>/api/v3/site, do you get a response?

Yes, but if you put it a public library you will be opening yourself for all sorts of copyright trolls trying to sue you for file sharing.

Correct, so when I post my song I created to Funkwhale, it’s then federated across the fediverse, living on other servers and able to be downloaded.

AFAIK, the songs do not get distributed across the Fediverse, only the link to the original server.

Someone in the fediverse likes my song and they download it. Who then protects my license and attribution rights beside myself?

How is it different from you hosting your songs on your own website?

How is it different from songs you made available through Bandcamp? Does Bandcamp go chasing people pirating your work and/or using in unlicensed cases (e.g, playing in a commercial setting)?

Monal works fine now.

No, it doesn’t. It is still far behind in features compared with Element. It still doesn’t have things like reactions, which is pretty much standard in any messaging app.

That you think that Monal is an acceptable alternative makes me believe that your biases are clouding your judgment and make it very difficult to accept your premise about Element being “damned” because of its funding. But let’s just agree to disagree, because I don’t see how this discussion can go any further.

Again, if “venture funding” is some sort of cheat code, why can’t XMPP make use of it? Do you want some moral high ground or some minimally useful product with mass reach?

nominally FOSS

Does it allow copying and redistribution? Yes

Can people fork it in case Element tries anything ridiculous like what happened with Elastic/MongoDB/Redis? Yes.

The thing is FOSS. This is what matters. Enshittification is being thrown around way too easily nowadays

rather about not shitting into your own water supply.

And where is the water provided by the XMPP side? “if you are on iOS, use siskin” is not at all an acceptable answer on 2024. The mobile OS with the largest market share in the USA simply does not have a decent client. What is going to be the next line? “People shouldn’t be using iOS anyway, so we shouldn’t spend our resources on it?”

Honestly, we are going in circles now. I don’t want to get in some type of flamewar over two separate open protocols. It starting to get ridiculous like discussing which branch of the Christian Orthodox Church is the purest one.

I am not trying to distort anything, I just don’t agree with your “venture-capital has enabled Element to snatch away the little sustainable funding that exists” premise. I don’t see what going after government contracts has to do with “open source funding” and I don’t think that “using VC funds to give away free stuff for developers” is something to be held against them just because the XMPP companies are not willing to risk it.

If the XMPP business are thriving in the IoT space, good for them. But to me, as a consumer, this means nothing if they are not willing to compete in the space.

Also, as long as we are talking about Free Software for the end product, I honestly do not care about who is funding it. All I care about is that I can find some way for my parents to talk with me and see their grandkids without depending on Facebook/Google, and if doing it with Element/Matrix is easier than doing with XMPP/siskin, then I’ll be using Element. I don’t need any of them to pass some arbitrary purity test, I just need them to deliver something minimally usable.

So, companies working on XMPP are healthy and thriving, but they can not afford to extend into the consumer space because… they don’t want to go up against Discord?

makes business sense if you care about the longer term survival of your company

Then you make a separate entity to take risks in that space, kinda like what Amdocs did with Matrix?

I’m sorry, you can’t have it both ways. Either XMPP consumer XMPP is in a dire situation because Element beat ahead of the others due to their VC funding, or businesses working on XMPP are not interested in the consumer space because they don’t see it as worth the risk. But it makes no sense to claim that Matrix has achieved bigger mindshare with no actual merit in making a more accessible product, and that XMPP is acceptable as is.

Now, that is quite a stretch. We had almost 15 years of zero interest rate economic policies, all the “cheap” capital available to everyone and you are telling me that none of the companies with a vested interest in XMPP managed to get resources to grow because Element was sucking out all the air from the room?

If getting XMPP to be in a state that could compete with the proprietary messengers were that much cheaper than the resources taken by Element, why is it that none of telcos pushed for it to have something to show in the OTT space? Or why couldn’t Process.one/Prosody get any VC interested when there are so many firms that make a living of just copying whatever is trending?

You are trying to rationalize XMPP’s failure to get more adoption by blaming Element, but this is not a zero-sum game. I’ve been to XMPP meetups, and absolutely no one ever talked about initiatives to make it more appealing to masses. Everyone just wanted to geek out and scratch their own itch. If the XMPP community never valued commercial success, fine, but then don’t act like someone else robbed their lunch when all Element did was do the work that XMPP supporters didn’t want to do.