Princess Lillie of the Stars

I installed Sync to try it out, and noticed the subscription model for no ads, and for basic features like push notifications and exporting a list of your subscribed communities. $2/month or $100 for a “lifetime” subscription. Immediately uninstalled it, yes it has a beautiful interface but I’ve never been fond of subscription-based apps, especially for FOSS services. A low one-time fee would be acceptable to me, like the $4 fee for Toot! for Mastodon.

The silly thing to me about the subscription is, they say it’s to “cover the monthly running costs”. What running costs do they incur if Lemmy is free and open? I’m genuinely curious, if anyone knows please tell me.

lemmy.world and lemmy.ml are different “instances” of Lemmy. Anyone can host one, and every Lemmy instance can talk to other Lemmy instances, and similarly any other software using ActivityPub. It’s part of the “Fediverse”, or the federated universe.

In the long term, it won’t matter unless lemmy.ml starts defederating from other instances or other instances start defederating from it. “Defederating” is a term for when the admins of an instance choose not to talk to another specific instance.

Oh yes, by several metric tons. I’ve used both, calling GNOME lightweight would be hilarious.

I can definitely vouch for Plasma, the Steam Deck comes with it and it’s great

🫘

Instances can choose to defederate from other instances for any reason. Think of them like divorced parents: they refuse to talk to each other. Federation is vital to the Fediverse. If most instances end up defederating, the illegal content instance can’t thrive.

And if they somehow manage to do that, people will download their data and move to another instance or spin up their own, and they’ll get the exact same content. It’s the open nature of the Fediverse, it’s impossible or at least incredibly difficult to monetize.

The Fediverse will never be monetized. It’s open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator’s pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.

Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn’t monetized. It’s free and open by design, and will always be that way.