In 2005 I bought an inexpensive black-and-white HP laser jet for $99. To this day it still prints flawlessly after sitting idle for months or years. The toner never “dries out” or goes bad. Nor have I ever once needed to print in color. If I ever do, I’ll go to a print shop.

I think I’m on my 3rd toner cartridge since 2005. Highly recommend.

How has he not been forced out of Tesla yet? Does he spend any time with them at all?

And that’s why corporate media will always suck.

Does this feature help our users? Yes, but does it make us more money? No. So we’re not doing it.

I have not looked into it or anything, but I think a tumblr alternative would do very well on the fediverse. I think it could even be better for self-hosting than Lemmy.

Excellent!

Me neither!

Fantastic!

Agreed. It sounds to me like lemm.ee is in good hands.

I think it’s natural that there should be a small collection of large, production-class instances that host the vast majority of users. The important point is that there are more than a few, and certainly more than one.

I also think it is important for instance admins to lay out their plan for how they intend to host and fund an instance if they intend to be production-class.

We also need some kind of account backup and migration tool so that if an instance goes down, those users can easily recover on another instance.

I think it’s only older people who remember what the internet was like before everything became corporate controlled or SEO optimized.

I always found it hilarious and sad when people interacted with brands. “Someone you know liked Walmart”. Why?

In an SSO scenario, your home instance would still need to be around to act as the IDP. I don’t think that adds much in terms of functionality over what we have now.

The ability to backup and migrate your account is critical to prevent losing your data if an instance goes down. SSO wouldn’t help you in that scenario.

I’m liking Memmy a lot so far.

That’s a very good point.

I think a lot of people don’t care, and a lot more people just have no idea what’s going on. You have to be hyper-aware of how your data could get farmed in order to prevent each new service from collecting it.

I think that universities are perfect for hosting instances (of Mastodon too). It would be a great teaching opportunity, and the cost seems like it would be negligible.

When I was a kid, our internet connection was actually hosted through the local university. It makes sense for them to participate in distributed platforms like this.

While I certainly like having the choice of so many servers, and I think it’s smart to spread the load, I also understand why people would want to make sure they are in a stable server that has a reasonable chance to stay around. You have to put a certain amount of faith in the instance owner.

I agree with him that there is inevitably a strong tendency toward centralization, but I think a key feature to help with that would be the portability of one’s account to new instances. Even if the majority of users are in only a few instances, there is still a safeguard against one entity (I.e. corporation) directing the health of the whole system. If accounts were portable, when an instance went foul, people could move and the system as a whole would self-heal.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting article. And the cost and challenges of running a web scale service are not conducive to small time players.

I agree. Ultimately, I think there is a real chance that there ends up being 2 major fediverses. One that is federated with Meta, and one that is not.

I think that those joined to meta will ultimately become like the losers table in a school cafeteria. They can hear all of the conversations, but nobody will engage them. I’d rather be in the not-federated camp.

Amazing! This gives me hope for the future of the internet. It was always meant to be distributed, not centralized into a few corporate hands.