General Discussion

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Welcome to Lemmy.World General!

This is a community for general discussion where you can get your bearings in the fediverse. Discuss topics & ask questions that don't seem to fit in any other community, or don't have an active community yet.

🪆 About Lemmy World

🧭 Finding Communities

Feel free to ask here or over in: [email protected]!

Also keep an eye on:

For more involved tools to find communities to join: check out Lemmyverse!

💬 Additional Discussion Focused Communities:

[email protected] - Note this is for more serious discussions.
[email protected] - The opposite of the above, for more laidback chat!
[email protected] - Into video games? Here's a place to discuss them!
[email protected] - Watched a movie and wanna talk to others about it? Here's a place to do so!
[email protected] - Want to talk politics apart from political news? Here's a community for that!

Rules

Remember, Lemmy World rules also apply here.

0. See: Rules for Users.

No bigotry: including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
Be thoughtful and helpful: even with ‘silly’ questions. The world won’t be made better by dismissive comments to others on Lemmy.
Link posts should include some context/opinion in the body text when the title is unaltered, or be titled to encourage discussion.
Posts concerning other instances' activity/decisions are better suited to [email protected] or [email protected] communities.
No Ads/Spamming.
No NSFW content.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Jessica

ElectroVagrant

fubo

152

please donate if able 🙏 (self.general)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by elfahbeht to c/general

11 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Over the years I have self-hosted a ton of stuff for people on the internet. So much, in fact, that I started a little non-profit to sort of make it "more official". I love to help people, and people are truly grateful when I set something up for them. So I continue to do it. That being said, it can get expensive.

Funding is the biggest risk we face, as users, if we want to see the fediverse be a good long-term solution. Lemmy instances, be that .world or otherwise, do not have VCs backing them that can burn money for years on end like other tech startups. They are either able to pay for the services, or they don't exist.

So, I implore you: please consider donating to any of the fediverse instances that you enjoy. Shifting the internet's collective mindset towards paying for the social services we use could really be the beginning of something special.

Here are links to the .world Patreon and Open Collective:

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Tangentially related, but is there an effort underway to archive fediverse content? I think the danger of federation is the loss of a valuable knowledge base if an instance goes offline.

[–] 2pt_perversion 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That's my biggest fear too. And even with archiving if you spend all that time growing a community and the instance just dies then you have to rebuild the community from scratch on a different server. It seems oddly risky because without secured funding who knows which instances might die and when.

I think long term there might need to be some form of revenue from the site just to ensure needs are met and incentivize devs/admins to stick with it. But maybe the donations will surprise me and things will go smooth like wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

By definition, a copy of every post, comment, community, and user profile exists on every instance that federates with another instance. Data preservation should be trivial, even without a proper archive.

I could imagine a scenario where a popular instance owner goes rogue and brings down their server, only for the whole thing to be restored from federated copies by some other group.