We could have a long conversation potential models for funding this, but I believe that until today the current audience prefers to reject economic reality and still believes that all work should be volunteer-based. Of course I disagree, but the only strong argument that I can make so far is that Communick has been running for almost 8 years and has outlived the overwhelming majority of “community-funded” instances out there.
It’s clearly a bug. Consider this a signal that I still hand-roll my CSS instead of just using clankers to vibe-code around.
Where is this hosted?
Germany
By whom?
Servers are from Hetzner. My company (MushroomLabs, LLC) is registered in the USA because I used to live there before moving to Germany. I’ve checked into creating a proper GmbH but revenue so far is so modest that it has not justified the effort.
How can we trust them if they don’t give us means to vet them?
For the services that are end-to-end encrypted, there is no need to trust me. For the social media services, by definition your data is public and sent to other servers.
A tabular matrix of E2E encrypted systems they provide would be more transparent.
This table would have only two entries: Matrix and XMPP.
Like Steve explained. The messaging protocols are e2ee, the Social Web/Fediverse services are all public by its own nature. There is no such thing as Private Social Network.
I will look into changing the wording on the front-page to make this more clear.
You are holding it wrong… (and clearly I haven’t tested this enough on mobile) :p
Put it tn portrait mode, the overflow issue will go away…
Yes, I have to agree that the documentation area of the site has been lacking. Let me know what information you think should be there and I will try to update it.
Rebased is just a fork of Pleroma. It is meant to work as a microblogging application and last I checked it didn’t do anything too different from Mastodon.
Resources they themselves were producing ?
Not enough to sustain itself. This is what I meant in the beginning with “not able to afford its own army”. They were clearly unable to produce enough total wealth to share and distribute among the people.
Working with each other, for each other, works.
Only if you are willing to accept medieval-age levels of economic output, and only for small scale populations who are completely isolated who have somewhat equal access to available resources.
but it has brought enough progress
No, it didn’t. It’s very easy to see progress in the short term if you are sacrificing the long-term. The “free school for everyone” was not really free, it was sustained by the Commune taking resources from outside, but sooner or later they would run out of Other People’s Money.
Then maybe we shouldn’t try to have large-spanning entities.
Yes, agreed. This is one of the reasons that I don’t like to see the Fediverse as a bunch of “platforms” and would prefer to have it working as a proper decentralized web.
Just like internet services.
Internet services only work because everyone speaks the same language/protocols, which is only achievable with a large centralized authority, or with a network where peers do no trust each other (blockchain-style).
defense is not the most basic role of society
Not the basic role, but it is one of the most basic ones.
point of view at odds with the whole concept of what the Commune is about
You are projecting. You wish that people could live in peace and harmony and that followed the “concept” of the Commune. I am just pointing out that - as noble and good their ideals were - the Commune catastrophically failed when it was put into practice and had to face the reality of the world.
If the economic science itself doesn’t account for what is the goal here.
It shows a lot of hubris to talk about “goals” for society at large. It can work for a small group of people with a shared view and unchallenged leadership (like a small corporation or a family clan), but try living like that in anything larger than a small village and you will quickly see that the system is not sustainable. The Commune of Paris is only one of many examples.
We are talking about economic systems. If the system is not able to keep even the most basic of roles of organized society (defense), it has failed.
practiced in the Commune de Paris
The one who couldn’t even afford the upkeep of its armed forces?
If the people willing to put in the money and time were preferring to do it on their own for that same sum.
Different groups of people. My (few) customers pay to have peace of mind and have a service that works for them. The self-hosters were people who seemed enthusiastic about a “cafe sospeso” system, but indicated no interest in letting unknown people into their servers nor in contributing to strangers.
Two things:
Something something “Capitalism is the worst economic system, except for everything else that has been tried”.
Most if not all revolutions in human history only occurred when the “power-adjacent” class sided with the ruled populace and actively fought the rulers. For us (the comfortable middle class) to shrug and “Not play the Game” is quite lame.
you are trying to compete as a restaurant with people wanting to organize a barbeque with their friends.
Yes and no. I don’t want to compete with the community. I was just expecting the community to have bigger ambitions that having a barbeque with their friends, and consider organizing itself to bring down Kraft Foods.
We had this discussion before. People that want to treat this as a hobby can by all means go for it. But hobbyists alone will never be able to build and maintain something that can become a real alternative to all the shitty dominant economic systems out there.
community-funded
Community underfunded. What the community is giving out barely covers the cost of the hardware, much less the labor of the admins.
Last year I considered offering accounts via a Caffe Sospeso on Communick, but it quickly became clear that is was going to suffer from the tragedy of the commons. Everyone that was willing to bear the actual operating costs would prefer to run their own servers to serve themselves, and the ones that were asking for “community supported” accounts were overwhelming just interested in free-riding.
There is !xbox@level-up.zone, which is a community on an gaming-specific instance. If you post good quality content there for a week, I can make you a moderator l.
Yes, I think you get it. My assumption is that there would be a lot less of “community instances” compared to “user instances”.
This could be mitigated quite easily by having a clear separation between instances run for users and instances for communities.
There is no need to change activitypub for that. Relays already do exactly what you are asking.