1. Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
  2. Support the hosts with our own funds.
  3. Moderate our own communities.

The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.

    • Cabeza2000@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      About the “less fragmented” part.

      I don’t see how that is possible in the fediverse.

      Let’s say I like fishing and a fishing community exists in five instances… That fragmentation you can’t avoid… In the other hand it helps with the resilient part I guess. The more fragmented it is the harder it will be to take a community down.

      Having multiple communities under the same subject in different instances will soon become normal, for better or for worse.

      I have read some comments in github discussing possible ways to develop something akin to “mutireddits” (or more recently custom feeds) so people can group communities like this across different instances.

      Let’s see how all this plays out. Interesting times ahead in the fediverse.

      • ascense@lemm.eeEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        That makes me think having something like “federated communities” could be neat, where a community on one instance could opt in to have content mirrored/visible from a community in another instance. In practice it would be something like subscribing to a community on one instance essentially being equivalent to subscribing to multiple communities on different instances, but if there is disagreement on e.g. moderation practices moderators might decide to “defederate” the communities.

      • Laxaria@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        I’ve functionally mass-subscribed to every community that overlaps with my primary interests regardless of which instance it is on and make use of the feature to view submissions from subscribed communities.

        The fragmentation is frustrating because it makes individual communities seem less populated than the topic actually implies. For example, there are multiple large Games communities across the biggest instances, but as they are not on the same instance, people are likely to participate in a subset of all of the available communities. This generally reduces the volume of participation in any one community, even if the volume across all those communities summed up is very substantial.

        A “multireddit” at the community level would be quite nice (rather than the process of subscribing to a large number of communities and using the “subscribed” feed).

    • PineapplePartisan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      One of my biggest concerns about Lemmy is the seeming inability to prevent astroturfing by various groups. I also wonder how it will survive when (not if) they receive GDPR fines, legal holds from law enforcement organizations, and a variety of other legal and regulatory topics that Lemmy (or at least the instance owner) is subject to even if the user base doesn’t believe that to be the case.

      Hopefully the donation model will allow enough funding to address the realities of running a popular service.

        • darthfabulous42069@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          You literally can just download the Lemmy program and install it on any computer you want to use as a server. I used to run Mastodon servers a few years ago, and it’s not without its hurdles, but with some Linux knowledge and a little bit of server admin knowhow, you absolutely could.

          You’d need a computer you’re gonna use as a server, put Linux on it, then install NginX or Apache on it, then Lemmy, then set everything up and get a domain name to attach to the computer’s IP. Question mark, profit. It might be a bit of an oversimplification, but with some research and work, it can be done.

            • tburkhol@lemmy.worldEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              Lemmy isn’t distributed like that. Each instance does its own user and community management with local storage and processing. The community content - posts and comments - gets distributed to any other instance that asks for it, and that instance then presents it to its users. The result is that the content is replicated & distributed across many instances, and the load of presenting that content to users is shared.

              So, running your own instance, where you’re the only user, will cause that instance to fetch whatever communities you’ve subscribed to via API. That probably reduces, slightly, the load on those servers, but it’s not going to be a huge effect.

              Running your own instance and getting a dozen or a hundred friends to use it instead of lemmy.world or feddit.de, on the other hand…

                • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Probably, but the idea is lots of smaller instances, if you run into that barrier, your instance is probably too large. The largest fedi instances have around 20K - far less than a few million. Most smaller instances, like the one Im on are around 1-1000 users.

                  Id strongly discourage people from letting their instance reach the million user level as costs would probably far outweigh what a donation or subscription based server can support.

                  The point is to avoid the diminishing returns of monolithic instances and spread the load and users across multiple instances - if I were lemmy.world, kbin.social and beehaw I’d put a hard cap at 50K users. Wether they do that though is up to them.