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Emacs.ch Admin (@[email protected])
emacs.chAfter careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to discontinue the operation of Emacs.ch.
After almost two years of dedicated service to our community, I'm tired. Tired of taking the legal responsibilities of hosting potentially illegal content, proactively removing CSAM and porn, hate and racism. Tired of remembering adults that they should stick to our server rules. Tired of yet another personal attack by random people who hide behind their pseudonyms, yet eagerly dox others and threaten their families. Who demand, but never give. Who think they are better, because they are different. Yet have nothing better to do than destroy what they can't agree with.
In accordance with the Mastodon Covenant, we are providing a three-month notice period. Emacs.ch will officially cease operations on December 9, 2024. So, take your time to find a place that reflects your values - I'll keep the engines running until then.
For those who have recently made donations, I will be reaching out individually to discuss appropriate arrangements.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to all who have contributed to making Emacs.ch a unique and valuable space over the past two years. Your participation and support have been deeply appreciated.
A big "Thank you" goes to our four moderators, who have spent a lot of time approving sign-ups and handling reports swiftly and in a fair manner. And to all users of the first hour, who helped to make this such a great place.
Thank you for your understanding and continued support during this transition period.
Emacs.ch was a very special place for me. ❤️
It shouldn’t be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.
The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt “ripe” enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.
Aren’t you kind of making my point?
I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.
@rglullis @Rooki (OT: the last paragraph in the post has a couple of typos. I believe it should be TINSTAAFL (also I recommend making it an abbr for the less informed), and there is an “under” that should probably be “understand”)
“No such thing as a free lunch” (alternatively, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” or other variants, sometimes called Crane’s law[1]) is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. **The acronyms TANSTAAFL, TINSTAAFL, and TNSTAAFL are also used. **
You are right about the “under”, though. I “accidently half a word”, there. Will fix.
Then again, the Emacs server is not shutting down over costs. It’s shutting down because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.
Sure, you could pay people to do that as well, or maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed to ease the burden of individual instance admins. But this specific case is explicitly not about server costs.
“There’s no such thing as free lunch” is a stupidity. There is. You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning, and they are often provided ingredients for free from supermarkets that would otherwise end in the trash.
It’s a dumb metaphor that doesn’t even work in the original example. There is more to life than capitalism.
That didn’t mean nobody should pay. I make monthly donations to my Mastodon instance, and will probably branch out soon to support to other services I use as well. But everything is not always about money.
You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.
If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do just that, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.
The fact that things do not have a price do not mean that they are free. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.
Why would big tech ever want to get rid of nasty meat bags when nasty meat bags drive much of their engagement and thus increase their advertising revenues? We can’t escape the realities of how the human brain operates, how much it likes to be stimulated regardless of the qualities of the stimulus.
I think a much more logical goal would be to take just enough action to avoid most (but not all) legal consequences while otherwise encouraging as many nasty meat bags to encounter other nasty meat bags with opposing viewpoints as possible. That would maximize brain stimulation, increasing engagement and thus revenue. This improves the stock price and makes your boss happier with you.
Nasty meat bags I am talking about is human moderators.
Oh, I see. Still not seeing a big incentive for big tech, those meat bags are providing free labor. No strong need to replace them.
edit: Oh wait, you’re talking about paid ones. Nevermind.
Free labor? Google/FB employ these people.
Thank you for pointing this out
I totally get where they’re coming from with that shutdown announcement. I’ve had to “talk myself off a ledge” a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there’s eventually going to be something else later.
What suggestions do you have to change the way we’re treating/running it currently?
Plain and simple, instances should require some form of contribution from all members. Let’s stop pretending that the people here can not pay a dollar or two per month.
I think a dollar or two per year would suffice if all users paid it.
FYI, if you really think that’s enough then you should check out https://feddit.org/post/2600584
The most efficient large instances cost ~$1.40 per user per year for hosting costs, and that’s if you value the admin/mod costs at $0
Yeah, and developers. Apparently, they all think development of Lemmy, alternative frontends, supporting tools, client libraries and everything that enables the ecosystem falls out of the sky.
That thread is ridiculous. It’s downright offensive to everyone working in free software and shows how little they are valued.
The thought was that it’d be closer to that, than the 12 times larger suggestion.
And yeah, I was definitely only taking hosting costs into account, because every instance is maintained by volunteers. I was also only thinking about large instances that benefit from economies scale and smarter management.
I took a quick glance at that thread, will have a more thorough pass later.
A dollar per year won’t even cover the storage bills, much less the labor of admins and moderators.
Per user? There are instances running on like $10/mo virtual servers with maybe the same amount spent on storage.
How many users are on these instances?
(And you are still ignoring the cost of labor.)
I don’t know exactly what happened. But I’m guessing he was doxxed and bullied by activists based on this post https://tenforward.social/@zyd/113086796304683411
That sucks
I actually kind of enjoy the “scrappy diy effort niche” thing.
it’s fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It’s not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.
Well, I guess it’s priorities. Destroying Big Tech would be pretty nice, but I’m really just here for the community.
Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.
I mean, you are not entitled to people being soldiers in your war against Big Tech. Like, I’d be totally for it, but some other time, nowadays I’m resting and being creative. Speaking of, not everyone here laps the crotch of Spotify et al. I’m a proud (but modest) pirate.
I wasn’t the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.
I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what “when you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” really meant.
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Nice, I just hope that you are contributing with more than $1-2 per year. ;)
Also, if you understand the importance of support it the instances, why don’t you wish that everyone did the same?
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Indeed. We are already struggling to get users and content, adding a paywall would probably kill the platform
The idea is to get rid of “instances with open registrations”. It doesn’t mean that paywalled instances are the only way to achieve that.
The fediverse will never destroy big tech unfortunately. In their worst case, they will incorporate it and easily dominate.
If not completely destroy it, at least make it irrelevant for those who want to avoid it.
The FOSS movement never destroyed Microsoft, but it arguably made it possible for us to live in a world where Bill Gates owned every PC software that we run.
In my opinion, the fediverse as it exists today is very vulnerable to domination by big tech. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is it is too small for them to care that much.
If the fediverse ever becomes mainstream, big tech will dominate it. If we want to fight big tech, we need to rethink our strategy and the fediverse, because right now, the fediverse is not ready to take it on.
How would that happen? If the core idea of “the Fediverse” is to have a loosely-connected network of servers and applications speaking a common protocol, how is it that they would use to “dominate” it?
I am not saying that Big Tech couldn’t try to use it “open wash” their solutions, like Facebook and Google did with XMPP before. But what I am saying is that (like XMPP) I think it’s virtually impossible for them to “dominate” something that is open.
I’m also not saying that the software we have is ready for the masses (it isn’t) but all the issues I see are just a matter of implementation, not a fundamental design flaw.
There’s several vulnerabilities:
This is not answering my question, or we have different ideas of what it means to dominate.
80% of email traffic is either Gmail or Outlook, yet none of Big Tech is able to control it fully. They can not force you to use their email server, and smaller providers still exist and are actually healthy business.
Is it hard to run an email by yourself? Yes. Is it impossible? Absolutely not. To me, that is what matters.