I mean, the real answer is that most open source developers aren’t here for freedom at any cost. They’re here like a startup… Waiting to be acquired for big bucks. Open source doesn’t pay bills, and if a megacorp pulls up in a Brinks truck full of cash, I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of open source projects sell

I get that, and I agree with it in general, but there’s literally no company on earth that would approach open source developers with the intent to pay them to work on a closed source product, or to buy out their open source work without having an NDA in place. Hell, even if Meta just wants to pay them to do open source work to support the community, there will still likely be an NDA covering what they can say to the public about the arrangement or anything they learn from having access to internal systems.

It’s like saying “Meta has security guards at the doors to their datacenters! They must be doing something illegal in there!”

Meta is evil and is very likely doing something bad with these developers, but the NDA isn’t the smoking gun evidence of evil… It’s Meta’s history in general

I don’t know why everyone is so upset about the NDA thing… It’s such a standard business practice. Whenever I (a mid tier infra engineer at a mid sized software company) needed to talk to a vendor, get a product demo/consultation, get support on a licensed application, etc… We either sent an NDA to that company or bad one on file already with them. Nobody discusses internal processes, policies or roadmaps with an outside contact without an NDA first. It’s literally just a standard business practice.

It could be nefarious, since it’s meta afterall, but I wouldn’t be shocked if there’s thousands of people/companies who have standing NDAs with meta just so they could come on campus and demo their product to some team

I’ve replaced some “non replaceable” batteries in phones before… Only to find that after about 5 years of medium use the flash storage goes to shit (which causes massive slow downs), the chips begin to desolder themselves, the USB port gets janky and stops charging, etc.

Batteries are a great first step, but damn these $1000+ devices just are not built to last more than 3 years

Idk. I’m conflicted on this. While I agree… For bigger/broader topics, I can definitely see that the quality of discussion and the repetition of topic is already really bad for smaller/niche communities.

When the subreddit had maybe 2k subs worldwide, and now is comprised of 50 subs spread across 3 instances… It’s rough. That community is just dead and that sucks.

I guess I’d rather have one centralized community on one big (yet open source) instance where I know we can leave and move again, than have the community just for entirely

It’s not that they’re for this specifically… It’s that they are self centered. They’re the same 75% of the population that is willing to cross the picket line at Starbucks cuz they want their coffee. They don’t think about the workers rights, they only care about coffee.

The same people just want memes and football and porn. They don’t care about what’s behind the scenes unless it directly impacts them. And let’s be honest, the reddit changes (for now) impact like 10% of reddits user base. That’s not enough for them to give up some dumb memes for

It’s just amazing really. Had they rolled out a reasonable rated plan, and maybe even a discount to highly known apps, and even set a “the price will go up each 6 months for the next 2 years till we reach this higher, but still reasonable price”… All the apps would have added a subscription model for like $0.99 a month and none of us would have really complained.

Like, honestly most of us would have paid and maybe grumbled slightly but said “that’s the cost of maintaining this huge community, and I get more than $0.99 in value from it” and just kept shit posting on Reddit all day.

If they wanted to block AI models, limit the API keys to only well known apps or those that are manually verified to be not-an-AI by reddit admins.

It’s amazing how dumb a corporation can be sometimes (or has some nefarious endgame ala Twitter)

Not exactly the same but similar… There’s 4 major providers who service my area, but only one of them extends down my block. So I can choose from DSL (which to be fair goes up to like 35 Mbps), but if I want higher, I’m vendor locked to Xfinity, who charges at least 2x the price of the local companies.

Ive asked several times, but they quote hundreds of thousands of dollars to trench fiber down my street, and it’s just not worth it.

Except, you know, there’s already fiber from Xfinity… They just wont share.

The physical cabling needs to be government owned and rented out to the companies, not exclusively owned by one single company. We’ll never have competitive pricing unless it’s nationalized infrastructure

Yeah, apparently I was wrong about this (still learning lemmy and fediverse stuff…). Text content of posts and comments are “synced” to your server and stored in your database there. Then future requests for that content are served from your instance. So its not as bad as I thought it was (the network load should be lower since you aren’t acting as entirely a proxy, more like a cache), but database bloat will be a huge problem (its already a big problem in other federated things like mastodon and matrix, where every server ends up saving everything they want into their own database).

I’m not sure what happens when the original server goes down, does the federated servers discard that data? Or do we each maintain a forever copy until we want to get rid of it ourselves? There’s also some notes I’ve seen about how servers only incrementally cache federated content (only posts and comments that are viewed by someone are fetched, and new comments may not be fetched until someone wants to see it)… so not everybody has a “pure and full” copy of posts necessarily.

But overall I wonder how all the various sysadmins hosting these lemmy instances will deal with the expotential growth they’re going to see, or if smaller instances will start defederating to save on hardware costs (no reason for my tiny instance that only talks about blue shiny rocks to federate with lemmy.world and store all that content)

Yes. If you run the server, then you are the source of truth of that community. All other servers that federate your community query your server to access the community and show it to their users.

So if you run a server and a community explodes there, you might only have 500 users on your instance, but you might have 50k users reading that community and interacting with it from other Lemmy instances, thus your server needs to scale to 50k users worth.

And ever more essential, your server is the source of truth of that community. So if your server is hacked or corrupted or deleted, that community is gone. Other instances don’t mirror it (except for temporary caching), so the Lemmy network essentially is a trust network of other people maintaining servers long term (and each inventing a monetary system to pay for it). I still think the network might be better than a centralized system like reddit, but it definitely has a lot of growing and policies that need to be sorted out very soon

A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).

Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn’t protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there’s currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).

I guess I’d rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don’t agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data

That has the same problem as any federated service like Lemmy… all that content only exists at the whims of whomever is willing to run the server and foot that bill. If they decide to delete their server, or just screw up and it dies… all that is gone.

We’re basically relying on thousands of individuals to be good quality sysadmins and infosec engineers, all for free.

I guess we could move to a mirroring/caching concept so that no single node contains the only copy of loads of data, but then we’re duplicating huge quantities of data.

Like even today with Lemmy, there’s now thousands of instances stood up and I bet 2/3 of those will be dead within 6 months. So all those posts and comments that get made on those nodes will just go poof… which might be fine for a chat system, but for forums and microblogging (mastodon) that seems terrible

I think they’re saying that they like using the local view as a /r/all type replacement (a view of the highest voted content across all communities). But they’d like to be able to selectively add an entire other instance to their local view.

The only way to do this today is to subscribe to every community on your main instance and every community on the other instance, and use Subscribed as a mega view… But then that ruins the Subscribed view as a selected subset.

To put it another way, I want to view all the best content across N many instances at once, so I can discover new communities.

What’s really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?

If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn’t mean it’s safe from going away at the whims of one person