After careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to discontinue the operation of Emacs.ch.
After almost two years of dedicated service to our community, I'm tired. Tired of taking the legal responsibilities of hosting potentially illegal content, proactively removing CSAM and porn, ...
Sadly thats fediverse, instance come and go as they like. Because behind them are humans that do this in their freetime ( most of the time out of their own pocket ). Big respect to everyone hosting a federated instance.
It shouldn't be like this. If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
But you can already see the hurdles of large instance like lemmy.world.
The costs are so immense (probably because of some unoptimized code), the software isnt "ripe" enough that it can be left alone for few months and have it run smoothly. It needs permanent monitoring and maintenance. And that doesnt even go into the moderation issues.
I totally get where they're coming from with that shutdown announcement. I've had to "talk myself off a ledge" a few times to not go the same route and shut mine down. Ended up making some server policy changes that helped, but there's eventually going to be something else later.
If we keep treating the Fediverse as just a scrappy, amateur effort, it will never reach its full potential and it will be forever just a niche thing.
What suggestions do you have to change the way we're treating/running it currently?
@rglullis@Rooki (OT: the last paragraph in the post has a couple of typos. I believe it should be TINSTAAFL (also I recommend making it an abbr for the less informed), and there is an “under” that should probably be “understand”)
I believe in co-op instance management solution like beehaw uses.
$2.00/year would mean i would require 200 active paying users per year. thats not too bad
the world as it is with its twitter/reddit is survivor bias. so many other social media sites have come and gone, why would the fediverse be any different?
eventually it will be instances who solved for the long-term problems of financial solubility and technical maintenance requirements.
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux is actually Emacs plus Linux. Linux alone is not an operating system. It's just one component of a fully functioning Emacs system made useful by the Elisp interpreter, buffer editor, and vital system components comprising a full OS.
Some computer users run a modified version of the Emacs system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Emacs which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Emacs system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is used in combination with the Emacs operating system; the whole system is basically Emacs with Linux added. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of Emacs plus Linux!
If this later returns as ed.ch (more streamlined and lightweight, minimal featureset, perhaps not even the ability to store remote files so as to avoid the CSAM issues, etc) it'll be The Day.