Ok, which part of “multiple metrics” is not clear here?

Every risk analysis will have multiple factors. The idea is not to always have an absolute perfect ranking system, but to build a classifier that is accurate enough to filter most of the crap.

Email spam filters are not perfect, but no one inbox is drowning in useless crap like we used to have 20 years ago. Social media bots are presenting the same type of challenge, why can’t we solve it in the same way?

I wasn’t the one starting the protests against Reddit, and I am not the screaming at my computer whenever Elon Musk says something completely stupid.

I just thought that after all these years, more people have understood what “when you don’t pay for the product, you are the product” really meant.

Platforms like Reddit and Tumblr need to optimize for growth. We need to have growth, but it is does not be optimized for it.

Yeah, things will work like a little elitist club, but all newcomers need to do is find someone who is willing to vouch for them.

Just add “account age” to the list of metrics when evaluating their trust rank. Any account that is less than a week old has a default score of zero.

I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.

Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.

If you value the admin/mod costs at $0

Yeah, and developers. Apparently, they all think development of Lemmy, alternative frontends, supporting tools, client libraries and everything that enables the ecosystem falls out of the sky.

That thread is ridiculous. It’s downright offensive to everyone working in free software and shows how little they are valued.

Free labor? Google/FB employ these people.

Why does have it to be one or the other?

Why not use all these different metrics to build a recommendation system?

Nasty meat bags I am talking about is human moderators.

Well, I am on record saying that we should get rid of one-dimensional voting systems so I see your point.

But if anything, there is nothing stopping us from using both metrics (and potentially more) to build our feed.

That would be only true if people only marked that they trust people that conform with their worldview.

a paywall adds a considerable barrier to entry.

The idea is to get rid of “instances with open registrations”. It doesn’t mean that paywalled instances are the only way to achieve that.

• We can have more people running their own small servers to share with their friends
• We can have companies providing ActivityPub accounts to customers of their services (e.g, sign-up to the NYT and get access to any of the servers managed by Mastodon GmbH)
• We can have companies operating their own AP servers for their employees
• We can have phone/internet companies giving access to their AP servers as long as they have a contract or a positive balance on the top-up
• We can have “pay it forward” instances: admins put up donations, but they explicitly declare how much they want per active user account. The instance only accepts new registrations when it has secured the resources.

because the admin is tired of dealing with assholes on the internet.

You know another way to not deal with assholes on your instance? Charge just enough to make sure that people are minimally invested, and point them to the Terms of Service as the reason they are getting kicked out for egregious behavior.

maybe preferably, better tools need to be developed

If better tools was all that was missing, Big Tech would develop them and get rid of all these nasty meat bags. And as much as Google tries to do just that, they still hire tens of thousands of content moderators around the world for YouTube.

You have soup kitchens all over the world, the volunteers working for them do so because it gives them meaning,

The fact that things do not have a price do not mean that they are free. Somebody had to pay to get the food done and the volunteer can not take the hours worked in a kitchen soup and exchange for a discount on their electricity bill.

Nice, I just hope that you are contributing with more than $1-2 per year. ;)

Also, if you understand the importance of support it the instances, why don’t you wish that everyone did the same?

Not to single you out, but this attitude is unbelievably frustrating. Everyone here loves to waste hours of their day signaling their virtue and complaining about all the evils done by the corporations, but so few are actually willing to put any skin in the game. they complain about entshittication from Spotify and Netflix, but religiously continue paying their subscriptions while refusing to support smaller, independent businesses.

How many users are on these instances?

(And you are still ignoring the cost of labor.)

it’s fine if you want to have it as a hobby. It’s not fine if you want to destroy Big Tech.

A dollar per year won’t even cover the storage bills, much less the labor of admins and moderators.

What suggestions do you have to change the way we’re treating/running it currently?

Plain and simple, instances should require some form of contribution from all members. Let’s stop pretending that the people here can not pay a dollar or two per month.

Aren’t you kind of making my point?

I am saying that the Fediverse will only be sustainable if everyone pays a little bit. Relying on a few generous souls to make up for the thousands of freeloaders will always take every instance to a ceiling which is, frankly speaking, very low. LW has 18k MAU. This number is laughably low for any social network.