Lemmy.world used to cost that much, but I think they downscaled a bit recently, or are at least planning to as the current growth of the userbase has slowed down.

I was actually surprised by that 150 figure when I first read it, as it is much cheaper than what the BlueSky documentation makes it sound.

It is certainly possible to collect that much in monthly donations, but then again… how do you build a loyal base of supporters for running a mostly hidden piece of infrastructure? People always complain about the instance focussed nature of the fediverse, but the ability to build communities around them and get people actually emotionally invested in their home instance is IMHO rather a strength of it. That is also why I am slightly sceptic of easy account migration tools, as it devalues the instance as yourhome base to a certain extend.

There are some people hosting their own identity server, but yes the centralisation of the main aggregator server seems to be by design as they even scare people away from trying by talking about the high resource requirements of doing so.

IMHO Bluesky is only federated in the sense that responsibility for content and moderation can be outsourced, but the user endpoint stays mostly in control of Bluesky. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a company perspective… outsource the legally and personnel critical parts and keep the ones that are lucrarive for advertisement and can be easily scaled by throwing hardware at it.

But you must be a real sucker to take them up on that very one sided offer…

Bluesky is explicitly promoting their system as “choose your own censorship” kind of deal, which in the way it is framed could look very attractive to right-wingers looking for an alternative platform. While this is technically also true for the Fediverse, it isn’t promoted as such, and rather has a reputation for the opposite, as most fedi server admins are center-left leaning.

Bluesky might be also more left-leaning right now as obviously there is little reason for right-wingers elsewhere to switch away from Shitter to another (mostly) centralised platform, but given the overall low user numbers this could switch very quickly.

I guess we will have to see how this develops over time and get some answers from Brazilians that have a deeper understanding of the current social dynamics there.

Due to the language divide it might end up as two distinct social spheres, like Fedi’s Japanese bubble, but that’s a best case scenario for Bluesky I guess.

It would be interesting to know more about the additional users. The banning of Shitter in Brazil is very much tied to internal politics and AFAIK it might be the Brazilian equivalent to MAGA that is currently mass-migrating to Bluesky.

If so, this might be a bad thing for them, as they probably don’t want to get perceived as the Brazilian truth.social.

This is kinda the same idea but made for what you originally asked for: https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

“Everyone”? I know exactly zero people that have admitted to having a Bluesky account, but I know plenty that have an Mastodon etc. one.

I think this is at most a very regional or specific user bubble thing, and official user numbers for these commercial services are never trustworthy.

XMPP via its pubsub implementation could function similar to ActivityPub, but that part of XMPP is a bit neglected as few apps use it for anything more complex. XMPP’s real strength is in real-time communication and I think it’s good to stick with that.

I think XMPP is a nice supplement to ActivityPub instances for more private chat. You can quite easily hook the user database of Mastodon or Lemmy to an XMPP server and have the same user address work for both that way.

Wordpress is a pile of decades old php code* that is held together with string and tape pretty much.

*php isn’t the problem itself, modern php is actually pretty nice.

Given how crufty Wordpress is, I don’t even dare to imagine how bad the Tumblr backend must be that this is seen as an improvement by the developers.

They are working on that, yes.

But I would rather have no threads than those like Element has… what a mess 🫠

Depends on what you want to do with them. Some simple project that’s easy to work on? Sure, worth a try. But if you plan to do a complex roof installation for example, the cost of new PV panels is really the least of your concern.

IRC can actually be quite good. The main problem is the super outdated popular networks like libera.chat, but if your run your own IRC server with modern clients it works nicely (or you can use a good bouncer like Soju). Supplement it with a Mumble or Jitsi-meet server and you got at least a functional equivalent to Discord, even though of course not nearly as polished or easy to use as Discord.

We also upgraded fairly quickly and aside from some annoyances with the new image caching it’s not worse than 0.19.3, so relatively speaking this was a good upgrade.

I think there was a Nextcloud plugin that allowed doing that. If you run that anyways, worth a try.

You can grow larger plants in hydroponics, but the current setups really only make sense where land costs are at a high premium, thus you end up stacking plants on top of each other with artificial lighting, and as a result there is not much space for larger plants.

Hostile not quite, as it was a group of core developers. But still a shitty move, especially how it was done in secrecy and disregarding other devs and the larger community.

yes they will be redownloaded on request.

Reddit has been declining for years as well and basically just lives on momentum from earlier days when forums or forum-likes had their heyday.

Lemmy is trying to get a cut of a shrinking user base and is doing so by being a very close copy of Reddit. It’s not exactly surprising that it only “grows” when there is a wave of people annoyed with Reddit for some reason.

Your suggestions are fine, but the internet as a whole is moving to semi-private communities and Lemmy is not going to stop that overall trend.

Doesn’t look like you can swim in that blue lagoon though.

Here the geothermal plant (23MW) is currently adding a nice public pool that will open soonish. Looking forward to try it.