It’s pretty amazing that it’s as cohesive as it is.
That’s a very good point. I’ve often wondered that myself. We may have reached peak Linux already - it’s so hard to scale up massive FOSS projects without somehow sacrificing ideals on the way.
Many things in a FOSS ecosystem will sooner or later confront you with one hard truth:
The program you’re using was not developed for you.
It was developed because the creator saw a problem and wanted to fix it. Then they made a program to fix it and stopped refining the program the moment they were content with it. Little to no consideration for other users or mass-adoption. Which is fine, they developed it, it’s their time.
But it also means that you will frequently be confronted with things that are objectively unintuitive and unreasonable from a new user’s perspective because they make sense from a developer’s perspective. The former will always be outranked by the latter, even though there will always be more users than developers. Unfortunately that’s just how it is. There are some few exceptions, but they are just that, exceptions.
That’s why Lemmy is such a GDPR nightmare :(
I know you’re trying to sound optimistic, but that particular example required significant (worldwide, in fact) external intervention…
Correct! Is that particularly important?
The Bay never went away. It’s always been there for you and it will always be there for you.
Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.