I run BT Free public charity https://btfree.org/

I suggest putting it on your about page. i personally try to limit my time trying to contribute to FOSS. seeing that someone is a actual contributor helps prioritize how to try to help. i assume other people have a similar approach.

maybe Mastodon has the most users (idk)

Probably

can they get them out to vote?

My assumption is that if someone is willing to pay and support FOSS he is going to be more thoughtful. There is a risk that just newer platform might not be well known yet so they will get less votes despite being superior. maybe have people give a score on a scale of 1-100 like the ACSI and if a platforms say have one percent of the votes and has the highest average it is selected. if this will gather interest and will go on for a few years different approaches could be tried. and you could do polls asking the community what to do . you could set up some kind of paywalled community, i think discord and patreon has that feature but maybe there is a open source alternative (mitra?).

Nice job growing your instance BTW.

Similarweb reports a estimate of the total visits in a month. lemmy.world report says “520,592” total visits which is a lot (more then a website in my country i visit relatively frequently).

That of course does not indicate the quality of the interactions which is obviously important ( i still spend time on reddit, but the quality of interaction in youtube for example is better then reddit and even lemmy for me because it has actual experts in it TBH).

One way it is measured is by customer satisfaction, where for example for social media bluesky currently gets the highest score at least as measured by the ACSI. with pinterest and youtube in the second place. but the scores aren’t that high (bluesky is at 82/100).

Other then that there are various awards, like the oscars or the emmy. Maybe we need a fediverse platform of the year award and fediverse instance of the year award. People could have to donate some money to vote so there won’t be a risk of too many bots gaming it and the money could be used to fund the instance/platform or fund the marketing of it. but i don’t know if enough people are interested in that.

I guess maybe set up a community on lemmy. have the client automatically make posts to it. or comments to a specific post?

Or maybe have a bot clients will send messages to?

Lemmy has a bunch of libraries for automation so that could be used to extract the information you need for the test.

Of course that probably makes it easier to feed fake data (e.g. if china wants to make lemmy.ml more popular).

Pretty sure you want to use the AGPL and not GPL.

The ideal IMO will be some kind of experiment (probably something you should opt in). give people feeds and have them be ranked on a 1-10 scale and see which is better and do a Statistical hypothesis test to make sure the differences are not due to luck.

That is also a product of many variables (including software quality). maybe time to go back to the drawing board.

For this project I’m mainly testing distribution models

What do you expect to learn from those so called tests? (no offence)

The big questions in closed vs open is that there are different scenarios :

for closed source -> less competitor -> more users -> more money -> more investment in the project -> better product.

for open source -> more users want to use it and contribute to it -> better software -> more users -> more potential for making money.

The problem is that for the outcomes you want to track (more money or better software). there are so many variable involved that influence those outcomes so it’s hard to deduce that the license is improving the outcomes or making them worst.

You can register on ibis.wiki, open.ibis.wiki or other instances.

Correction, they are not listed as open to registration on fediverse.observer and they don’t have a register button on the front page. unlike fedipedia which is opened.

Also some instances appear to be missing from fediverse observer (i see at least opentextbooksolutions.org not appearing). you could feed it manually which should work (i did it for opentextbooksolutions.org) but a automatic addition will be better. also a lot of the other instances listed on the page you linked appear dead.

Not really, i did play around with it and added a few reviews and saw nothing like it.

neodb has other stuff besides books (games , movies ,podcasts, music ) , also bookwyrm license isn’t OSI approved which i don’t like (not looking to start a holy war on this, form your own opinion).

Example instance.

I don’t use GIMP really but i feel like this “gimp sucks” thing you read on social media is just a good example of how social media can be overly negative.

Two review websites (g2 , capterra) have thousands of reviews and the average rating is pretty good , around 4.3-4.4 out of 5.

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.

Why not link the source code from the website (or did i miss it?)

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.

The website is already linking to google play store and apple store. right now apps that are purely web don’t have a platform to read reviews on . plus neodb lib.reviews are open source although they might not yet be ready for the task yet.

Besides Lemmy mainly gets promoted by word of mouth (eg people recommending it on Reddit)

I doubt that, any data? similarweb shows the top referring site for now is openalternative.co (although at least one of the referring sites mentioned doesn’t seem to make sense for me ).

If people want to review Lemmy communities, it would make more sense to make a Lemmy community for that purpose.

I think people would want to see average ratings. reading a community page means you only read 1-3 reviews and that sample size is too small and potentially biased. you could just run into people who hate a instance for some particular reason (and it’s not hard for me to think of reasons like that).

Two ideas i like:

linking to a bunch of platforms that have reviews of lemmy, fynd does this:

A neodb instance (but maybe another platform would do) where you can read and write reviews about fediverse instances (but that would require at least one volunteer to moderate it).

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.