Mersampa

I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the "main" instances. I don't know exactly what concerned people

One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.

The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.

Some of us have been waiting for some time for more "average" redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.

I think they might cave. Think of it like a negotiation.

John: Hey, we make zero from third party reddit apps, we should charge them

Fred: Well, they produce a lot of content, which is what keeps people on the site

John: Hmm, we should charge them anyway. Keep the shareholders happy. $1,000 per 50 million requests.

Fred: But won't there be a big uproar?

John: Well, that will happen regardless of what we charge. If we think we can get away with charging $1000 per 50 million requests, let's announce $12,000 per 50 million. Then we can walk back to $1,000 and everyone will think we're being reasonable. If we started at $1,000 we'd probably have to walk it back to $100, and that's a waste of time.

Fred: You're brilliant, lock it in!

https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

I've known this for a while too, but it's been hard finding something. I think Beehaw is what I've been looking for, because my first experience of Lemmy was... well let's just say that it's a lot more pleasant on a server that has chosen not to federate with certain other servers... it scared me off for a while.

The Apollo dev comment on this. They have a subscription model already, but would need to more than double the cost just to meet the cost of the API.

They worked it out as $2.50 per month for the average user. But I'd be willing to bet that you'd have less users using it more if it cost that much, so it would need to be higher. And then you add taxes. And even then it's all going to reddit, the dev gets nothing.

This is based on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/

80/20 rule.

When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.

The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.

If you're in the 20% that isn't covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it's just not where the effort should be focused.

So you have all those servers, but why can't you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?

You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).