Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs -- and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we're moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn't have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.

I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn't sustainable.

Well said 👏👏

Subreddits doing this will have a much bigger impact than end users, because large masses of people will never do anything inconvenient on their own. This is the reason why capitalism doesn't self-regulate for better environmental standards, for an example. The whole personal carbon footprint thing was invented by an oil company to shame individuals so we can blame eachother for our consumption instead of regulating energy companies. Nothing changes if we rely on everyone to do the right thing without any external motivations (be it environmental regulations or closing subreddits).

That's not to say you shouldn't also look at your own actions - personally I deleted Apollo on my phone and blocked the reddit domains on my work laptop and home network. But big players (I.e big subreddits) need to be part of the change.

It's been attempted in various spots, but either reddit itself removes the mentions or edits them out

True that. Kinda weird actually to go dark but not providing alternative avenue.

I've been promoting Lemmy for the past few days and have gotten my comments removed and downvoted by people claiming that Lemmy was a far left recruiting ground for domestic terrorism lmao

Anything short of indefinite is just a virtue signal, imo.

I'd like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:

If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior

They're heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it's preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.

I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.

That's the thing that bothered me the most about deleting my account. I had multiple people say thanks for posting solutions and problems with solutions I had, even years later. Not specific to iphone but in general.

I feel that. I posted about a Plex problem 2 years ago and the subsequent solution I worked out. Every once in a while I still get someone replying to that and thanking me.

There was talk of someone populating a Lemmy instance with reddit data.

There is a lot of reddit data on a torrent somewhere aparrently.

Not only that. But if Reddit really suffers badly from this it might also have an impact on small communities. It's really simple to set up a community on any topic on there. And it's currently mainstream enough that you can get people on-boarded pretty quickly.

Larger communities may find a new home elsewhere. But for smaller ones that feels much more difficult.

Thanks to last week's fiasco I discovered the fediverse and hopefully others too. I just hope it's intuitive enough that people don't get scared away.

That's a problem with every non-physical storage of data/knowledge - it's ephemeral and can disappear anytime

I’m worried that all the new large communities are hosted at a single instance, lemmy.ml