Sounds like something that could be useful for Lemmy itself, no?

Flakes are only important if you want to develop for a nix system. If you are only using it or if you (like me) only writes server code which gets deployed via docker (or your language packaging solution) there is no need to think about flakes.

But the social network can be open. My current idea is precisely to build this like communick (replacing Mastodon with Takahe) and make it on top of the activitypub-enabled services that can interop with other networks, except that to get accounts at the instances people need to pay the monthly subscription.

Oh, wow, talk about timing.

Last week, I wrote a post asking for feedback for an idea to fund musicians. While the feedback was mostly positive, I realized that what I was proposing wasn’t necessarily restricted to musicians, and could be used as a model for all types of creative work. So I decided to take this whole thing and make a prototype for a “paid social media network where people and companies can contribute to anyone working in a creative project”

That is absolutely not the case. I have posted many links to lemmy there. The only thing I still do on Reddit is discussion related to Lemmy and fediverser, there is nothing being blocked and I afaict am not being blocked.

Also, congrats on being the worst type of argumentative person: you said on the previous “getting angry is the first step to get organized”, I give you one example where you can get organized and your response is a complete dishonest misinterpretation bullshit about “starting your own telecom”.

This “so you’re saying” crap is 100% a tell for the terminally online, intellectual-yet-idiots types who can do nothing but blame their failures on something else other than themselves. It’s tiring.

No. I am saying that big corps run your country and you do nothing except being “angry”. Try doing something about it, anything, but please stop acting like all you are able to do is cry on an online forum and misinterpret what other people say.

My point is: getting angry is not enough, and a competition to see who seems the angriest or says the most disparaging thing ends up becoming performative action.

What I’d like to see is people showing real skin in the game. Telcos in the US are running a racket and abuse their de-facto monopoly? Then how about we start looking into companies that provide mesh networks like Fon?

To put in real terms: I know for a fact that I could offer you unlimited phone calls for ~$15 month and have a healthy sustainable operation, but I need at least 100 people to sign up to this just to setup the basic infra. Everyone would be able to make and receive phone and texts, but they would lose some convenient features provided by larger carriers. Are you “so angry” at the big corporations that you’d be willing to go get these 100 people, or is your anger just enough to fuel some occasional rant on an internet forum?

First, a bit of perspective: you were born in the richest country of the world and your salary alone is enough to put your family above the median national income. If you have a working spouse making half of that, your family would be around the 70th percentile. And again, we are talking about the richest country of the world. So, please stop complaining about losing some “birth lottery”.

Second, if the system has failed you, getting angry at some of the players can feel cathartic but is nothing more than a coping mechanism. It does little to nothing to actually find for a way to fix your problems. How can one help you to find a way to direct the energy from this anger to something productive?

There are better and more effective ways to fight for justice besides just wishing that fines or that (a) do not really affect their bottom line, (b) can cause immense problems to the people who are mere customers and (c) will at most get one of their engineers fired but never point fingers to the manager who asked for the change to be expedited and pushed to production without review.

So you want more people to lose full phone service?

Right, but just like in the dating sites, those that come with a huge list of absurd requirements quickly change their tune once they face reality.

If a employer answers the quiz with high expectations and marking all questions as mandatory, they will find out that the only candidates that can satisfy the criteria are likely to be unavailable or out of their price range, and then will adjust accordingly.

That as well! :)

The questions I am giving as an example are already there. What I am asking is to people to sign up, go through these questions and provide some feedback.

I completely agree with talking with the mods in the subreddits, but I can not possibly see how Reddit Inc will ever greenlight something like this. In a way, I’m actually hoping they will try to ban it because it would create some type of Streisand Effect.

They can try to ban the first or the second fediverser API key used by the fediverser app that I bring online, but if tens/hundreds of people start doing it, this would mean effectively that we will grow an army of independent crawlers and evangelizers for Lemmy and the fediverse in general.

Ok. I will setup a fediverser instance and make the changes needed.

That could work well for posts with links, but what about the self posts? The people that I managed to bring over from /r/emacs to !emacs@communick.news have mentioned that the main “problem” is that just posting the links make the community feel like a simple “planet emacs” aggregator and that they wished to have the self posts with questions as well.

Thank you for not dismissing my work right away and giving some more time and thought into it, I really appreciate it. I think that there is a lot in your feedback that makes a lot of sense:

• Having an automod post certainly would help. It would give a strong signal that the community on reddit is trying to migrate away from it. I think this could be achieved on the communities that were more vocal during the protests, but on the other hand I already had the experience on /r/emacs and there was a strong rejection from (some of) their moderators.
• I was initially against the idea of making a two-way bridge to post Lemmy comments there, but I’m starting to accept it. I’m still not sure how that would work in terms of API usage and if this would incur costs for those running the fediverser servers (on top of the costs of running Lemmy) but I’m willing to try it out.
• Speaking with the people in the big instances is something I’m already doing (or at least I’m trying to by posting about the tool in different communities before unleashing it) :)
• The idea is not to automate everything and create a “firehose of reddit bots” here. I was talking with the admin of programming.dev yesterday and we seem to agree to cap “fediversed” posts to a maximum of 25% of “organic” posts that the community had in the previous day. We can also agree that link posts should not have the comments, and that “self posts” with questions or topical discussions can bring some of the comment threads. This means that the very small communities would be seeing only one post a day, and the ones that are growing or more established would never be suddenly taken over by the bot army.

Some of the other things though, I think will be harder to change or compromise, and if the admins or mods reject the proposal I will flat out not use the tool there:

• I do not see the point in creating a separate community. I am fully aware that the bots and their automated posts should never become a sizable part of the community, but I feel like that if keep them separate them it ends up being as toothless as lemmit.online.

• I do not want to ask permission from Reddit to do this. They’ve already been quite hostile to the third-party devs that were willing to work together, I can only imagine that they would never be welcoming to someone who’s is clearly aiming at getting their most valuable individuals in their userbase.

• The idea to let reddit users register and take over their bot accounts is fundamental to this project. I want to make it very clear that this whole thing is a strategy to get people into the fediverse and put strong focus on the content creators of small-to-medium communities. I am trying to bootstrap a business around it and this is my attempt at increasing the TAM. The more people on the fediverse/threadiverse, the more SMB segment will look into establishing their media presence on the fediverse as well, and then I can start to actually have a sustainable operation.

Sorry, I will challenge you on the notion of usernames as personal identifiers. Last time I had to go through legal advice for a system we were building, the final advice was that usernames are only treated as such if they can be correlated with other online data, such as cookies or authentication tokens. To give an absurd example, if you sign in to a website and claim the username “rglullis” you will not be in any way connected to me and therefore the username can not be used as an “online identifier”.

I expect that an “anger” response will probably be more likely than any other response, which will harm adoption.

Only if you assume that the majority of people are on reddit because they have a strong connection to the platform instead of the network, which I really believe to be false.

And also, not what I have experienced with the emacs community. The number of people that responded favorably to an invite was a lot higher than the number of people who showed lack of interest and non-respondents combined.

IMO, work should be focused on spreading awareness in a non-assertive way about why moving from Reddit to Lemmy is the “correct” choice.

Content is king, there is no way around it. Social networks can survive “fail whales” just fine. Bugs on Lemmy can be fixed. What can not be fixed without a major effort is the fact that Lemmy is losing active users and that people on reddit are already adapting to the “new normal” of crappy mobile apps, puppet mods and Surveillance Capitalism.