it’s just that it doesn’t work efficiently enough.

Yeah, but we live in a world of limited resources. in particular labor and specifically knowledgeable linux nerds willing to answers questions for free. If everyone will have that mindset there won’t be a lot of time left to answer the difficult questions .

With that said i agree that occasionally if its done its probably no big deal, there is also linux 4 noobs for those who want to ask some questions to help getting started with linux.

Active users and number of servers also recently reach all time high.

If you want to learn how to create a good open source project for the fediverse. i think peertube is the best role model for that.

TBH i think you’re overthinking it, funding software development and running businesses like open source software development is often driven by self interest (even if it’s not easy to accept) . Like in software development part of it is throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. So trying to transition to more closed model is expected (some of the projects you mentioned went back to being open source).

Sure i have my opinions about software licensing but for me open source is good enough. if something like that will happen and the software is good a fork will be made. That is a acceptable risk-reward calculation to me.

Which is not useful if those users are people who try out the platform and then abandon it, or worst bots for state actors.

Right now i don’t see any movement in the amount of donations (patreon, liberapay). so i am not kinda skeptical this will end up being meaningful growth.

They have a explanation here. they claim part of the problem was banning people who are harmless and not homophobes (they show at least one comment ).

Maybe it is better to avoid duplication of effort and contribute to OSGL.

You just need to add a “mature” tag to it and a option to filter by it. contributing to it is easy as far as i can tell.

It costs real world money to keep that data. tbf i don’t think you would find a service that does not delete inactive accounts. iirc when i did a market survey to find a new email address basically all free providers didn’t guarantee keeping your data if the account is free and inactive.

Allow people who fund the platform vote on features (that are pre approved ). who contribute more get more in return.

“time well spent”. and maximizing the “average quality of content”. maybe by allowing custom feeds. or feeds that are based only on the votes of trusted users. with governance models supporting how those feeds are managed like how KDE and GNOME nonprofits are managed. maybe vote on best post/comment of the day/week/year/decade with leaderboards for that.

Linus law of trail and error. allow people to easily extend the software .with plugins and ideally a store with reviews for addons like in firefox and chrome. making experimentation easier and safer (without risking adding a bad feature to all users of the software). vote on features implemented rating for example how satisfied you are on a scale of one to ten.

information over speculations . use A/B testing to see what works in practice. maybe use “counted statement” for example “this is useful” or “this is important” beyond lemmy and reddit upvotes and downvotes.

Right now a life changing post from world class expert and a funny cat picture with someone who spend too much time online are treated the same by the software. this should somehow change.

We have lemmy apps that still aren’t supporting API changes added over a year ago. We even had one such case last week.

That sounds like something could be improve. is there some sort of warning mechanism in place?

Say when using a lemmy client. the client either specifies its a production build. or if its not then the lemmy server reports where deprecated API’s are used.

Not sure that is the correct approach. break frequently break often seems better (that’s what PHP and java seem to do as far as i can tell, unlike python 3 which caused a lot of drama).

notify a API is deprecated. give some time for users to update to the new API (1 year?) and then remove it.

Of course after version 1.0 there might be less breakage so it won’t be a be problem.

Why not provide a option to use an a desktop app?. maybe also add a flatpak. self hosting seems kinda complicated and i am not sure what are the benefits of that.

Also a demo instance would be nice.

This isn’t what i had in mind. i meant more like changing the line to something like:

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, donating money and helping find and fix bugs.

With “donating money” maybe replaced with “funding”.

I think liberapay has that feature.

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs

I feel like people giving their hard earned money for lemmy also should get a show of appreciation.

Why is it not a part of the project itself if you don’t mind me asking? i would imagine plugins are for the more opinionated or experimental features.

Sounds reasonable. maybe take 3 months. spend about 30-50 hours working on this and see you can sustain the motivation to do this. then decide what to do next.

I wouldn’t. id rather give it to some FOSS non profit that would allocate the resources intelligently tbh.

Still, i try to act like an environmentalist and that means not buying stuff i don’t need. also a big part of that money will go to funding manufacturing costs and the development of new products for the same product line. unlike a campaign where a larger share of the money will go to developing a phone (and some of the money will go to give a return on investment to the owner, which is something i am fine with as long as there is no non-profit that can do the same work better).

Also for the CEO or board of directors it will be harder or even impossible to deduce that this signals a interest in a FOSS friendly smartphone.

Very Interesting. any ETA? will it have faster hardware like a faster CPU? will there be a fundraising campaign like kickstarter?