Totally understandable. I thought the admin response post laid that all out very clearly. I think a lot of users probably only skimmed it/didn’t read it, or were too influenced by their emotional state to have a more objective interpretation.

I think a lot of the users here have such strong emotions because of coming here from reddit, and feeling like they’ve found a new home they like even better, but view the possibility of Threads federation as a threat to their new space.

When there’s strong emotions tied to something, it’s easy for people to lose rationality and slip into emotional reasoning instead of logical reasoning. That’s when a normally well-adjusted person will start insulting, threatening, acting irrationally. That is, if you subscribe to the person-brain model.

The scene in Bad Grampa with the penguin guy is a great example of someone who has lost rationality. He acts in bizarre ways that he otherwise never would have. You can see that he’s rational in how he first starts interacting with Knoxville, but his rationality is eroded as he becomes more upset by Knoxville’s responses.

This kind of response happens with simple discourse online all the time, and it’s so unhealthy… I think it’s just such an emotionally charged topic for some users that they pass their threshold for rationality very quickly.

If you go to to the front page and open the side bar there are links to both Patreon and Open Collective. They’re shared with Mastodon.world still, since they are run by the same person.

Hey there! If you read the sidebar for lemmy.world the links to donate are all there 😊

I’m very pleased to hear that! I’ll stop complaining and adding to the negativity 😌

Can we please have a statement about your financial involvements, or lack of, with meta?

Naturally, but that’s sort of the magic of community-run initiatives. People give because they want to contribute, because it’s about making something together, and not about being exploited.

It’s just amazing what people can do when the central goal isn’t for like 2 people to become billionaires at the end of the day.

Would you be able to give a further breakdown of the Lemmy associated costs?

I’m really curious to know what the current operational costs are for a Lemmy server. I was hoping to be able to do some very rough math to calculate monthly cost per user, but with these current numbers I have to include users from Mastodon and Calckey.

Would there be a point in setting up dedicated donation links for Lemmy.World? Some potential donors might be confused or hesitant because they see Mastodon in the name and they’re not using that service.

So I wrote down some of my thoughts below, if you want to chat about it, feel free to leave a comment or DM me. (I don’t have Matrix, sorry)

So the core component of any social network is the network effect. In short, the reason we use Lemmy is because others also use Lemmy. We wouldn’t use it if there was nobody here (with thanks to Spez).

Indeed, that’s why people still use Reddit, Facebook, or any social medium: they don’t care about the platform, but about the people.

If Threads federates with Lemmy, they will instantly dominate the entire space: the most popular communities and most of the user activity will all be over there. (There are already 100M Threads users compared to under 2M Lemmy users, so this is essentially inevitable.)

If Meta would then later decide to defederate, the majority of Lemmings will be cut off from their communities. If in the meantime those communities had become important to them, their hand may be forced to sign up for Threads. Lemmy will survive, but it won’t be the same for most of its users.

Essentially, we have a choice to make: either we welcome Threads and accept that we will be at the whims of Meta for >90% of our communities and content (given their massively higher user count), OR we choose to be independent at the cost of having smaller communities and less content.

I would argue though, that having smaller communities may even be a pro rather than a con. I’ve seen many comments that the smaller scale of the Fediverse feels like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit (and personally I agree with that).

I think question to ask is what does Meta have to gain by joining the fediverse? They don’t need to. Their strength has been their large user base who are too dependent on their services to quit, and this small population is of no interest. So then why? What could be the reason a multi billion dollar organization would join the fediverse with a history of data mining and buying out other companies to increase their influence? Is forming a partnership with them to access their user base really a great idea? Why did people run from Reddit to jump into the arms of Meta? Is Zuckerberg really that much more trusting than Spez just because he doesn’t go on public tantrums and is using this open source tech? Do people want to be that connected with what Meta has to offer despite having been so adamant about deleting material from reddit and leaving behind their communities there? Is gaining influence in the space before the platform even becomes remotely mainstream friendly a strategic move on their part to stop it before it even happens?

It’s been hard enough trying to reform communities after leaving reddit and then finding to yet again try to reform communities on another instance and hoping people move there may be a hurdle that leads people back to Reddit where at least it is a more separate experience from meta. It does make me glad though that slowly communities are starting to become more spread out like Android forming their own instance just in case another migration from a big place happens. But, those are some of the concerns people have had where despite the ire towards Reddit recently they are still way better than Meta. I want see this place grow as something separate from corporate entities, but if many instances start partnering with then too then aside from use of small independent instances it starts feeling pointless to replace full time for the corporate experience.

So it’s a positive problem! Thank you all for doing the great work!