On the feature side, according to Mastodons recent 4.3 release post development is only 4 full time employees and a budget of under $500k annually. That is basically nothing in the realm of social media companies.

Improving Mastodons features requires money and resources, but Mastodons users are unwilling to pay for instances and unwillingly to fund development. Hell, the .world folks host a bunch of instances for collectively hundreds of thousands of users and they take in about $1k a month in donations. I’m surprised that even covers hosting costs.

So…it’s no wonder that it isn’t going to be as polished as other social media in ways that would reduce the attrition.

That’s cool. Personally I just integrated it into my normal chat client by connecting Aichat, which supports a ton of backends including Ollama and hosted options, with Matrix.

Blog post with more info https://jackson.dev/post/chaz/

PieFed has implemented Topics, which are groups of communities maintained by the instance admin. I think they plan to make topics per user at some point.

See https://piefed.social/topics

Meh, just run several associated services and keep the same username on all of them. Nothing is interoperable, stop trying to force it. And a rogue app with bad user data handling practices is still going to leak your data, even if you store your copy of the data securely.

My fediverse accounts are always “patrick@<service>.bestiver.se”. I currently am only running Mastodon/Lemmy and a few supporting services (e.g. a link manager - https://bestiver.se/@patrick), but I’m adding more as I get to them. Pixelfed, Peertube, Loops(?), Piefed…

Adopting this ActivityPods thing looks like it will require each Fediverse project to make what I’d guess are fairly significant changes to their user data handling, and none of those projects are properly funded for this. In fact what this actually seems to be doing is asking every other Fedi app to build on top of their user data API.

I applaud the attempt at building a new standard in the Fediverse, but I doubt it’s going to happen.

It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.

My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.

Do you think that Amazon gets its content (movies on Prime video) for free? Or do you think that piracy sites pay for their content (stolen movies on torrent sites)?

Edit: To answer you more directly, YouTube pays creators a cut of the ad revenue, and Amazon/Netflix pay the movie/show creators through licensing deals.

That just makes sense though? The legit sites have to pay for, fund, or in some way support the content which does cost money. The piracy sites obviously don’t have that cost so they don’t need as much income.

The piracy sites also pay a lot less in infra, since they rely on the user to store, seed to others, and serve the content to the local users. All that infra is offloaded to the user.

That is a lot of effort to go through to avoid using a VPN.

That’s interesting, I heard of Cosmic recently but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. I guess you’re liking it if you’re already building apps on it?

I’ve been slowly building a text based MMO game that I will probably continue working on this week: galactic-war

It’s based on Inselkampf, a very slow-paced game that I played years ago and wanted to play again. Inselkampf just started a new World this weekend, which it does every ~6 months, so I will probably end up working on my virtual clone of it this week while I’m thinking about it.

If you wanted to play too now would be a very good time to start. The userbase has continued dropping over the years it seems, with only a few dozen to a couple hundred players.

I also want to get releases and announcement posts out for a couple of my Matrix bot projects this week, pokem and chaz, but that’s been on the backlog for a couple weeks already

That’s somewhat similar to the plot of the movie Plan 75.

“In a dystopian alternate reality, the Japanese government creates a program called “Plan 75” that offers free euthanasia services to all Japanese citizens 75 and older in order to deal with its rapidly aging population.”

What could content creators switch to that would save your own bandwidth?

I don’t get why people are so allergic to subscriptions, but also want to get updates for the things they buy.

I used to work for Microsoft. I’ve had quite a few conversations with randos about how they’re mad that Microsoft stopped supporting the Windows version they paid for 15 years ago.

Huh, the ads are actually in the RSS feed? I definitely wouldn’t have guessed that.

That’s insane.

I love it.

Yea, too many people won’t realize that they are just the on-call person fixing it.

It looks like this was shared to Reddit as well, https://www.reddit.com/r/Nebula/comments/1ffnaza/who_actually_owns_nebula/

Dave Wiskus (CEO) responded over there:

Nebula the business is “Standard Broadcast LLC,” and is directly owned at the LLC level by me and 43 other creators (and growing).

Nebula the streaming video service (which controls the streaming revenue) is Watch Nebula LLC, which is about 83% owned by Standard Broadcast LLC, with the rest held by Curiosity Stream. All control and all board seats belong to Standard Broadcast LLC.

We use shadow equity for platform creators because assigning LLC-level equity would make signing new creators logistically impractical, and would have complex tax implications for every creator we bring in. US securities laws also are skewed in favor of the wealthy: it would be very expensive or potentially impossible for us to comply with them if we were issuing securities to small creators who aren’t accredited investors.

If substantial control of the streaming service ever changes hands, we are contractually required to split the proceeds 50/50 with the creators on the platform. 50% of streaming profits are distributed to creators based on watch time. Additionally, 1/3 of the revenue from any subscriber is allocated to the creator responsible for bringing in that subscriber.

Weird that he didn’t just ask.

You realize Nikocado has over 4 million subscribers, plus another million on his second channel? It’s not like there’s just a small handful of people who engage with this person.

It’s wild that Ben seems to think pickle juice counts as “eating pickles”. They were certainly a little lenient on that challenge.

The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se

I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.