this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
767 points (91.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

34356 readers
1350 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?

Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The big difference with Lemmy is that it's not really a service, it's a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don't want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.

Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don't have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.

Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.

Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don't have dictatorial control over their users.

Spez's fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it's your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it's the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a great analogy. It would be like asking what happens when someone tries to monetize email.

All the users would jump ship to another one immediately.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Most email providers are monetized. For most providers you either pay a subscription or they inject ads. The important thing is if they get to greedy and start providing a bad service you can switch providers.

Email services are monetizable, but email itself cannot because it's not a tangible thing, it's an idea and agreement to follow that idea.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh, I guess I've never noticed lol. Does Gmail have ads?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yup! But they put them in the promotions tab so they kinda blend in with promotional emails and they're presented very natively. The only way you can tell the difference is a little ad symbol.

They can't over exploit their users because users have choice. Back when Gmail first came out there was a rush between companies to provide the most storage and features and that's because email being an open standard inherently encourages competition!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm fairly certain ads in google search are affected by email content.

[–] LufyCZ 2 points 1 year ago

The Android app does, at least in some sections ("Social", f.e.)