Is this just for some petty motivation, like “proving” that people can not easily detect the difference between text from an LLM vs text an actual person? If that is the case, can’t you just spare all this work and look at all the extensive studies that measure exactly this?
Or perhaps it is something more practical, and you’ve already built something that you think is useful and it would require lots of LLM bots to work?
Or is it that you fancy yourself too smart for the rest of us, and you will feel superior by having something that can show us for fools for thinking we can discern LLMs from “organic” content?
Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.
Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don’t get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.
Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.
I could go on.
There’s no “shortage of instances” going around. As more people join the Fediverse, more admins will start instances.
This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.
the vast majority of instance-owners are bored, twiddling their thumbs due to their lack of users.
And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama…
There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.
Also, there are not enough admins around “doing it because they want to” if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.
Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.
Look, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you and I didn’t mean to “diagnose you”. You asked me why I was responding as if you are angry, and I tried to illustrate how your responses are sounding on this side of the conversation. I might be completely wrong, but this is how I am perceiving it.
I am not angry so I’m not sure what I’ve said that deserved that patronizing aside.
If you are not angry, you are certainly reading as someone who is facing an amygdala hijack. Your responses do not seem as someone who is collected and you do not seem willing to listen to what others are trying to express.
Case in point:
farmers and Walmarts have some features they share (…) Are you saying they don’t? That they are completely different top to bottom?
You are right, we are talking only about the features they share (i.e, profit-seeking) and whether this means that they should be treated equally. I didn’t say they were completely different. But do they have to?
Let me try again: you are asserting that a small-scale farmer who works out on their own volition and makes a living by selling their produce at a higher price that it cost them (i.e, seeking profit) is a net-negative to society and as unethical as a huge corporation like Walmart. You are saying “the scale doesn’t matter, any one working looking for profit is bad”. Is this correct or am I misrepresenting you?
I’m saying scale is irrelevant because profit motive corrupts other values
And OP and I are saying that this generalization is shortsighted. You end up putting on the same bag:
Small farmers and Walmart
A local restaurant owner and Darden
Independent commercial software providers and Facebook.
By treating them as equal because “both of them are seeking profit”, you are left with an economic system that is unable to grow to match the demands of the people.
Make an actual point.
I did, many times. It’s just that you don’t want to hear it.
The point is “Community is not enough” (I did link to the blog post, didn’t I?) and I’ve been saying since 2022 that the Fediverse will not be able to grow until is dominated by this belief “that every profit-seeking business is bad and therefore should be rejected”.
You can be mad at me all you want, you can be upset at this sad reality all you want, you can cry in a pillow all you need, but you can not say that the Fediverse has been a success story. We’ve had so many opportunities handed out to us to take this place and grow to become a viable alternative for everyone but we squander it every time because the loud minority of ideologues keep screaming “no businesses here!”.
Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn’t matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.
Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.
coops and non-profits and all sorts of structures exist for way more complex and difficult to quantify organizations
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
Is it really that difficult to think we can financially quantify people’s roles?
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I was a freelancer for 15 years, I had to quantify jobs constantly.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has “only” to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you’d be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
How do you decide “what they deserve”? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
If it’s indeed a trend for Lemmy to have 200% yoy growth then yeah, I’d think that’d be pretty successful.
You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the “200% growth” is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)
To go back to my original comment: let’s see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about “trends”, until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.
I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had 1M 575k something before Elon, hit up close to 2M 1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)
Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem “a lot”. However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you’ve seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
What I am failing to understand is: why?
Is this just for some petty motivation, like “proving” that people can not easily detect the difference between text from an LLM vs text an actual person? If that is the case, can’t you just spare all this work and look at all the extensive studies that measure exactly this?
Or perhaps it is something more practical, and you’ve already built something that you think is useful and it would require lots of LLM bots to work?
Or is it that you fancy yourself too smart for the rest of us, and you will feel superior by having something that can show us for fools for thinking we can discern LLMs from “organic” content?
Newsie.social has (had) 20k active users, mostly professional journalists. It has been threatening to shut down due to lack of funding for two years already. Every month their admin needs to beg around for people to donate.
Fosstodon started with enough donations that they could even send some of their money to upstream projects. Nowadays they are invite-only because they don’t get enough funding to sustain infinite growth.
Moth.social was active while they were sponsored by Mozilla, they are shutting down in March 12th due to lack of funding.
I could go on.
This is just wishful thinking. Go ahead and open an instance with open registration, see how long it will take for you to regret it.
And there is a huge number of admins that got users and then burned out due to harassment, spam, entitled users asking for/against federation due to petty drama…
There is not a single Mastodon &server out there that have increased donations or reach a sustainable level after they reach a few thousand users.
Also, there are not enough admins around “doing it because they want to” if we want the Fediverse to grow a few millions users.
Instagram has 2 billion users, Pixelfed largest instance has less than 200k active users. We would have to get 10 THOUSAND admins in order to compete with Instagram.
Look, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you and I didn’t mean to “diagnose you”. You asked me why I was responding as if you are angry, and I tried to illustrate how your responses are sounding on this side of the conversation. I might be completely wrong, but this is how I am perceiving it.
If you are not angry, you are certainly reading as someone who is facing an amygdala hijack. Your responses do not seem as someone who is collected and you do not seem willing to listen to what others are trying to express.
Case in point:
You are right, we are talking only about the features they share (i.e, profit-seeking) and whether this means that they should be treated equally. I didn’t say they were completely different. But do they have to?
Let me try again: you are asserting that a small-scale farmer who works out on their own volition and makes a living by selling their produce at a higher price that it cost them (i.e, seeking profit) is a net-negative to society and as unethical as a huge corporation like Walmart. You are saying “the scale doesn’t matter, any one working looking for profit is bad”. Is this correct or am I misrepresenting you?
And OP and I are saying that this generalization is shortsighted. You end up putting on the same bag:
By treating them as equal because “both of them are seeking profit”, you are left with an economic system that is unable to grow to match the demands of the people.
I did, many times. It’s just that you don’t want to hear it.
The point is “Community is not enough” (I did link to the blog post, didn’t I?) and I’ve been saying since 2022 that the Fediverse will not be able to grow until is dominated by this belief “that every profit-seeking business is bad and therefore should be rejected”.
You can be mad at me all you want, you can be upset at this sad reality all you want, you can cry in a pillow all you need, but you can not say that the Fediverse has been a success story. We’ve had so many opportunities handed out to us to take this place and grow to become a viable alternative for everyone but we squander it every time because the loud minority of ideologues keep screaming “no businesses here!”.
Of course the scale of the business matters. If scale doesn’t matter, a bunch of farmers selling their produce at a local market would be bad for their local community as Walmart.
Putting these two in the same bag is a mistake, this is what OP and I are saying.
Context and scale matters. Even though both small and big companies depend “on profit”, the methods they use and incentives that drive them are wildly different.
The fact that they exist does not imply that they were ever able to serve their community/customers/users universally. You either get some people being served well at an inefficient overall cost, or you get everyone being served poorly by a broken system which can not afford to provide adequate resources to workers.
IOW, I’m not arguing that “coops” can not exist. What I am arguing is we will never get rid of Big Tech if we keep forcing the idea that only community-owned services are acceptable models of governance.
In a centrally-planned system? Yes, it is very hard.
I assume you mean that you had to give a quote to a client?
If that is the case, your client has sole decision-making power and has “only” to evaluate whether the price you were asking for your labor is lower than the value you’d be bringing them.
How does this compare with a coop, where (presumably) the member-owners have all to agree on the price of labor? Are they going to accept to pay market rate for the people working there? Are they first find whoever is willing to work for the cheapest and then set the price on that?
How do you decide “what they deserve”? What should be the payment for a moderator, or an instance admin? What of you have someone also making contributions to the software and as such is in a position to add features exclusive to one instance?
How would that work? How would an admin separate downvotes from brigaders and legitimate users who happen to downvote a comment?
That creates an incentive for trolls to create accounts at the popular instances using this mechanism in order to destroy their reputation.
How long until it gets abused, and trolls start brigading though instances that hide their votes?
Try the sibling: https://communick.news/comment/4203442
You got it exactly backwards. There is a decline trend (monthly users go down month after after a spike) while the “200% growth” is not determined by any curve and can not be measured by any specific interval, because it was driven by one stochastic event that brought 100k people out of a sudden (the Reddit migration)
To go back to my original comment: let’s see how the numbers are going to be in the next month. If the first derivative is still positive, then we can talk about “trends”, until then we are just senseless cheering and extrapolating out of one data point.
Again: “back to baseline” is not meant in absolute numbers, but trend-wise.
Oh, wow, very impressive! Did you have to use a calculator to get to this challenging result?
Communick’s revenue grew 1800% in 2024, compared to 2023. Do you think that makes it successful in any way?
I am here since before the Reddit backout and I am on Mastodon since 2018. Lemmy was at 15k MAU, went up to over 125k and now is 1/3 of that. Mastodon had
1M575k something before Elon, hit up close to2M1.5M and now is sitting around 800k. (edit: I was looking at the overall charts and used wrong figures. Corrected now.)Sure, if your reference point is waaaay before the spikes then what we have now seem “a lot”. However, my point is that these spikes are far from being indicative of mass adoption.
Lemmy had the same jump in numbers during the Reddit Exodus. Mastodon had a huge boost when Elon bought Twitter.
Every spike has been a followed by a slide back to baseline in less than a couple of months. After you’ve seen it happen so many times, it is no longer interesting.
https://xkcd.com/605/