Pekka
Federation should not be an issue for users, I think we could make the front-end hide most of the complexity that it brings. There are only a few things that are harder now:
- discovering communities outside your own instance (this is now mostly done through a website that lists communities)
- logging in when you receive a link to a post on another instance (you have to go to your own instance, login there, and search for the post again)
- creating a community on another instance (this requires an account on the other instance to create the community, after that they can add you as a mod)
One of the things that could be improved is changing the login page to add least add something about Federation, so users won’t try to log in on another instance with the credentials of their home instance.
They already made the mobile site practically unusable by constantly reminding you to use the app. The mobile browsing experience was just terrible. They can just show the same adds in the mobile browser…
Apps that autoplay video adds really don’t respect people on mobile metered connections. Especially if these videos are 90 seconds long. This is such a greedy addition to an app where you are already paying for a product…
Although Lemmy is free and open source, the main power is the federation. The most valuable thing that Lemmy has, are its users and the content (this is the same for Reddit). And because of the federation every instance in the Lemmy network has these assets.
Let’s say one instance would get massive, and would stop federating and start charging for API access. If that happened, we would be in the same situation as now with Reddit. Yea, it would e a lot easier to set up your own instance, but you would still need to convince all these people to give up that main instance. So I’m really happy that federation basically would mean that all other instances could cut that massive instance out and still have all the data.
Not worried at all. Their source code controversy mostly hurts companies that want to run RHEL without paying IBM, as after these changes distos like Alma Linux and Rockey Linux might diverge more from RHEL and they will have a harder time to guarantee bug-for-bug compatibility.
Fedora is not trying to steal business and government contracts away from RHEL and as a normal user you don’t need this bug-for-bug compatibility anyway. You can just sign up for a RedHat developer account and download RHEL Server for free, this includes a GUI everything you need to run it on a workstation. You can even view the source code trough their website.
So I am not worried that CentOS stream or Fedora will go away, RedHat is not trying to hurt consumers, they just want that enterprises (that are interested in support contracts) actually pay them when they use the work they put into RHEL. If they want a free version, they can still use CentOS stream.
Great post. I absolutely agree, this was always a bit weird on reddit. I have seen people getting flamed on PC building subreddits for considering components that were expensive in the US (but where relatively cheaper here in the EU).
It would be great if we can really keep Lemmy a global community!
Simply replacing all the mods sound like a good way to kill a subreddit, Reddit probably has no way to pick good mods… Mods will need some connection with the topic, and you don’t want to pick random users with no experience for large subreddits.
Only Lemmy instances with custom emoticons were affected based on the Recap of the Lemmy XSS incident. So if Lemmy.ml doesn’t have these it should not have been affected.
A 502 status code does sound more like an error from the server, yes. The correct HTTP status code for a block by the government would be 451. But I’m not sure if countries that try to block social media respect this, they probably want to hide the fact that that website exists entirely. So they might go for a 404 error instead.