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Ghost have their code open source and offer paid for hosting which is not unreasonable as you’d to pay to send bulk emails anyway even if you self-hosted (although there are free tiers from some providers if your only send a few hundred a month).

There had been discussion about a Fediverse game and I suggested that a text-based MMORPG (like Urban Dead) would be doable.

It’ll soon be covered by the US instances if the Danish army can’t see off the Yanks.

I was just going to ask what the Irish instance was. I’d correct that asap as they can get awfully feisty when riled. I’ve got ¾ Irish ancestry, so it’s not racist.

Would it help if we got together a zipped file of the various Fediverse logos as SVGs and linked it in over there? The less work they have to do the more likely it would be to get adopted.

But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be

If you get a good deal on hosting then, on medium-sized instance donations easily cover costs. lemmy.world suggests this can scale up a lot even if you need more complex systems in place to deal with demand.

Yeah, the important thing is to get people off the Big Web, we can work on getting them their forever home later.

Also:

https://bsky.app/hashtag/beans

On the auto-selector, I’ve said it before but join-fediverse needs to ask a few questions: Service? Location? Language? Hobbies? And then it spits out one or two recommendations, with an option to load more.

While I’d be fine with an auto-selector (as I help Admin feddit.uk), it would miss out on the variety of instances out there - books, games (video, tabletop, etc), franchises, etc that some people might be looking for.

So how about 2 big points: auto-selector (based on location) and answer a couple of questions.

I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.

Lemmy is better for on-boarding on this front as they have the Local and All feeds from the start. Just having that front and centre (defaulting to Local, as you don’t want to overwhelm them) would be a big help.

My pitch is:

At the end of Web 1.0 and the start of Web 2.0 there was a rich ecosystem of forums, blogs (micro and macro), wikis, etc. However, you needed a different login for each one and the large social media companies, Big Web, saw their opportunity and made a more convenient offering - a site where everyone could go and talk to each other. That seemed great until a critical mass of people joined and then they found themselves locked into a walled garden, imprisoned by the network effect. That’s when the enshittification started.

What the Fediverse is doing is rewinding to before the takeover by the Big Web and asking where the Small Web would have evolved to if it hadn’t been sidelined. The answer is a protocol that would allow all those sites to speak to each other. And right there are the first glimmerings of the direction we should have taken - diaspora* and Friendica started in 2010, in fact it is felt in some quarters that Google+ (2011 until it was finished off by Facebook and Google’s short attention span) lifted some features from them. Unfortunately, the Big Web smothered such innovations, and it is only now that the Fediverse’s time has come.

The beauty of federation is you don’t have to believe someone who is running an instance if they say they won’t be evil, federation acts like a Ulysses Pact. y You can’t be evil because the barrier to moving is so much lower because the network effect doesn’t handcuff you to one instance. If an Admin starts power-tripping, you can move to another instance and carry on where you left off.

It works well and is easy enough to ignore if you don’t like it.

I think you may have sold me on this.

I’d had a look at what was on offer and this sounds like the best offer. Yes, I’ve heard people have problems with it but I reckon of I follow the guide and install a Fediverse instance (I’m thinking Hubzilla for a personal space so I can experiment a bit, get my rusty skills improved), it should generate enough usage to not get removed for inactivity but not too much to get me in trouble for hogging resources.

alwaysdata seems good if you only need 100Mb of storage and feedback is good.

I feel like there should be a dedicated fedihelp community for stuff like this.

Good idea.

Calling @Blaze@feddit.org - is there anything like this?

Instances are websites.

It’s not a bunker per se, it is just that, if you are a review platform, the easiest initial targets would be Goodreads, IMDb, etc. Other types of stuff to review may take a little longer. However, if you can get access to a source of unique IDs, it may be possible to import the information. As it is written in Python there will be knowledgeable folks around who can better advise on this. I’d suggest post about it here: !neodb@lemmy.zip. See what other people think about it.

That’s clever, does it work with Lemmy and/or Friendica?

There are a few ways to monetise the Fediverse.

• Donations - to devs and those running the instances. Lemmy gets enough from donations and grants to have a couple of full-time devs but it still doesn’t pay a lot. dansup using Kickstarter is proving interesting. Donations to your instance works well and a lot of places that offer this bring in enough to cover hosting costs but not much more. Open Collective has proved very good in this regard.
• Classified ads - !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca does a decent job of bringing buyers and sellers together.
• Subscription newsletters/blogs - Ghost is moving into the same space as Substack but with federation, so should do well.

So you wouldn’t be able to give up the day job by running an instance but you might if you were the lead devs of a popular service or if you had a thriving following on Ghost.

Flohmarkt is nice if a little small atm but of course it is very new.

Philosophically, the classified ad model (a bit like Etsy or eBay without auctions, where you are just an introduction service) seems more in keeping with the Fediverse and has a lot less hassles than trying to replicate Amazon with all it’s storage and shipping.

I’ll check if it would work to implement their api in a normal website/shop.

What I’d like to see is more seamless integration of !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca into other Fediverse services.

So someone has a blog for their writing on WordPress or Ghost but can run a sidebar or footer with links to Flohmarkt where people can buy a signed copy or special edition directly. Or you have it working with !neodb@lemmy.zip where users can read a review of a film and click through to see if anyone has a copy of the Blu-ray on Flohmarkt.

Equally, !friendica@lemmy.ca is a kind of Facebook replacement and Flohmarkt could slot in there as a Marketplace replacement.

In general we probably need more plug-ins in Fediverse services to help integrate things more tightly and Flohmarkt seems the kind of thing that would work well when slotted into a lot of other existing services.

if flohmarkt got “outlawed” for example because lobbyists and such

That would be very difficult to do with a decentralised service.

flea market

!flohmarkt@lemmy.ca

Reading the post, I found what I really want right now: a federated review platform.

!neodb@lemmy.zip is a general review site. It currently covers media but, if you can get the data in (SKUs?) I can’t see a reason it couldn’t cover other products.