That's actually surprisingly common.

Definitely - but that's 15% of the Mets budget. Screwed up as it is, it's also underfunded, and the result is that Londoners who are most affected by crime - predominantly low-income - will pay for this

If it's a small enough sub with a tight knit community, they'd have to shut down the whole sub anyway

Man, he's so professional. He gives answers that I'd expect a very experienced PR person to give, yet he's just a single-man operation developer.

This sort of thing is quite different technically.

With Inkscape, blender and gimp - the main draw is an extremely complicated UI that produces image files. A social network is just sending text around back and forth.

The beauty here is the activitypub spec. The way it works is like:

ActivityPub Protocol <- Lemmy Backend <- Lemmy Client

Building a replacement backend or client is comparatively trivial. Making a good one would be hard, of course, but a single developer could whip up something that's technically a lemmy client, or technically a activitypub backend over a weekend.

That decoupled layering, the idea that each bit just does one comparatively simple thing, is intentional.

If lemmy/kbin catch on (which it looks like they are), it will be not long at all before there are a a plethora of tools and clients cross platform.

I think people get way too caught up on technical optimisation issues with a language.

The reason a language, programming or otherwise, catches on is ultimately based on how many people use the language. So the lower the barrier to entry, they more people who will use it. PHP has a pretty low barrier to entry to creating a website (however simple/bad) and it has a lot of cultural momentum. I don't see PHP going away anytime soon.

This is a great test of the underlying principles of federation.

Maybe you think that the lemmy.ml creator is an unapologetic human-rights hating tankie.

Maybe you think that he's a visionary and bastion of free-speak.

Maybe you think something in between.

The whole point of a decentralised federated system is that it doesn't matter.

If history has taught me anything - I would say that means that kbin will persist forever.