matt

It was obvious - the instances are not shown on sources like fedidb.org anymore, but if you went to the instances which were growing fastest, all the accounts on there had gibberish names with almost no user activity.

It would be great if Lemmy actually had 2 million users, but it just doesn't, sorry. :(

Not accurate unfortunately as the vast majority are bots. It's more along the lines of 300k to 500k currently.

This is a strange take - Mastodon makes up ~80% of the Fediverse, whereas Lemmy makes up like 3% or something.

Mastodon is the entire reason the Fediverse as a whole ended up taking off - for most people, it is the only thing they are aware of.

K-9 Mail and Thunderbird ended up partnering about a year ago at this point, and they're planning to turn K-9 Mail into Thunderbird on Android (and also iOS and macOS).

Does it even matter what distribution you use?

I gamed on Debian 11 (now 12) with no issues at all on an nvidia card.

I feel like any distro can do gaming well, the only thing a distro can offer now is having things set up out of the box for you (Novara being a prime example of this).

GamingOnLinux has been on Mastodon for ages, Nov 21 2016 in fact!

But with the recent migration to Mastodon, I guess it couldn't hurt to let people know you're there already.

Yeah it's weird, there's plenty of examples of what people would consider "profitable" non-profits: For example Mozilla Thunderbird pulled US$6 million last year in donations alone, with the average donation being US$21, I think.

Mastodon, another non-profit, while not quite as lucrative, pulls in around £24,000 a month on Patreon donations alone, not counting any outside sponsors or Open Collective donations, and so on.

Build value, and people will happily support you.

The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.

Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.

As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it's very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.

Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.

I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.

I'd be surprised if there's more than one Meta instance, as "multiple instances" tends to make the UX more confusing for those who are unaware of it. So it shouldn't be hard.

Here's my personal list of recommended apps for a few things:

• Aegis (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - 2FA FOSS app that's minimal and simple
• Auxio (F-Droid / GitHub) - No-nonsense music player for local files
• ConnectBot (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - Simple SSH client
• K-9 Mail, soon to be Thunderbird (Play Store / F-Droid / GitHub) - No-nonsense e-mail client
• NewPipe (F-Droid / GitHub) - YouTube client for privacy, has no ads, supports background playing, local subscription lists, and ability to download videos
• Techmino (GitHub) - FOSS Tetris clone with no ads and multiple modes, definitely my favourite
• Waistline (F-Droid / GitHub) - Calorie counter app that stores all data locally. Need to add products yourself but have full control.

Just get the regular Firefox with uBlock Origin if all you're concerned about are advertisements. The default settings out of the box are fine for most users.

Get the Mull browser if you're concerned about privacy as well, as this is a hardened Firefox similar to LibreWolf. Not sure if this is on the Play Store, but it's definitely on F-Droid.