There was a reason given, but it smells of bovine excrement: https://mastodon.social/@dansup/114041543384358354.

When probed a bit more about it, the silence was deafening.

My position is

The more time passes, the more you are being proven wrong and the less you are willing to concede:

• You keep conflating the topic-based instances with the subscriptions to the accounts on Communick, even when I made pretty clear that the topic-based instances were meant to be kept open, without monetization and there was no plan to charge for anything there.
• Centralization continues to happen around the bigger instances, because the donation-based system is not enough to support the handful of admins that are willing to operate servers as a hobby.
• The Fediverse continues to struggle with growth and attracting mainstream appeal.

due diligence when I choose an instance to host a community I post too (…) I think they are a good sysadmin and do a good job, but they need a backup.

Couldn’t that apply to lemmy.film as well? Why were you then okay with posting there, but not on soccer.forum or metacritics.zone?

Please don’t become the next Mavs. Please don’t become the next Mavs…

I’m not saying he is “an issue”. What I am saying is that he refused to help at every opportunity.

it’s better to work on one at a time than trying to make them all a success at once.

He is already actively promoting and posting more than a handful of communities on lemm.ee and others. The only communities where he consistently found justifications not to help are the ones I run.

To repeat: I am not demanding anything from him and I am not entitled to anyone’s goodwill. But if someone has any form of objection or issue with me or my work, I’d rather they make it explicit so that everyone else can evaluate for themselves than sticking with this eternal avoidance and non-committal position.

Ok, let’s see if !football@soccer.forum does any better…

I believe you will find that most mods are narcissistic to various degrees.

Yep, I lost count already of how many mods of small communities I contacted, asking them if they were willing to cooperate and work together on a topic-specific instance. They’d rather be talking to themselves on “their” community than working together with others to build something with a chance of success.

There are also some other people posting highlights via Mastodon.

But it doesn’t matter if it was one or two people. One or two people are already more than the zero you had at LW.

The best is the enemy if the good.

Please, stop trying to rationalize your behavior. Your actions have already proven where your values and interests are, and where they are not.

I’m not expecting to change your mind and I’m not expecting any form of cooperation from you anymore. All I’m asking of you now is to be honest and outright state that you simply are opposed to what anything I do, build or propose.

At that time, there were more people posting on soccer.forum. This means that, if you had joined me and the others on soccer.forum, the network effects would grow in its favor.

So, yeah, you could’ve helped me and the topic instances. You could have helped with decentralization a lot more than “moving from the first to the second largest instance”. But for some personal reason you refrained from it.

And again, it’s fine if you don’t want to help, but don’t go around acting like your hands are tied.

If you want to take one data point in the extreme end of a distribution curve and use to construct an argument, then let’s just agree you are not in for an honest argument.

You love to point out past discussions, but you only show half of the story. Where is the link to the post where we had more people (beyond me) saying “let’s post on soccer.forum instead of LW” and you refused? You preferred to continue on LW (even when you were basically alone posting by yourself there) and the best excuse you found was that you didn’t like the domain name. When I said “I can get a .football domain” (which I did, btw) you went then to say “oh, please don’t do that” and expressed some concern trolling about the cost of the domains.

So, forgive me if I sound “aggressive”, but all I am doing is pointing out the inconsistencies between what you say you want and what you end up doing.

What you are doing is called “massaging the data”.

If a server is active it is counted whether it has only one user or someone that is using so sporadically that they get counted only every 3 months.

Seems like a good distribution.

Sorry, it’s not. FediDB lists 415 active servers for Lemmy. A good rule of thumb to think as something sufficiently decentralized is when 80% of the users are spread around the top 20% of the servers. This would mean that we need to get at least 82 servers amassing the users that are now on 10 only.

This has more to do with LW being so high.

huh? lemm.ee alone has 14% of the userbase. 1/7th of the people on Lemmy are there. You are making a huge effort to avoid seeing it, but if you really care about avoid decentralization, lemm.ee should also be avoided just like LW.

People aren’t posting to those communities and instances because there are more established communities on more established instances.

I already asked you many times to not shield your opinions by arguing about what “other people do”.

There is nothing stopping you to say “I don’t want to centralize things around the big instances, so I rather post on the topic specific ones”. And you seem perfectly fine making the effort to push consolidation around lemm.ee and even lemmy.film, but flat out refuse to extend any help to the topic-instances that I run.

It’s fine that you don’t want to support anything I am proposing because you want to keep this free from “commercial ventures”. It’s fine if you are a hater. But at least do me a favor and stop pretending you aren’t.

Every admin team here manages one instance. You’re the only admin wanting to manage 20 at once.

Operations-wise, managing one, two or 20 instances is the same thing if you have enough automation.

Also, if the instances are not open for users, the real work is not on the operations side but on moderation. This is something that can be done by others that are not admins.

(and before you come back with “modding a remote community is hard”, I would be okay with opening user accounts for moderators on the instances)

The top 10 instances by MAU have ~80% of the total user base, and LW and lemm.ee alone have 50% of the Lemmy MAU.

An oligopoly of 2 instances (or 3 or 5) is not that much better than a monopoly. If you really want to talk about decentralization, we shouldn’t have user numbers dropping exponentially this early in the distribution curve.

I encountered things that are showstoppers

What are those things? In the sibling post I wasn’t asking you to directly to do the work, but just to please point me at the issues that you see are preventing you from joining and participating…

Let me know which communities are missing rules and I will take a look. I’m running these alone but I’m more than accepting of any help I can get.

shows & movies dedicated instance that turned out to be too much for the admin and went poof

I did offer to put all the topic-specific instances under a consortium of admins, but no one has yet taken up on it.

I’m well aware of the issues of instances being run by overwhelmed enthusiasts that crash and burn, though. But thankfully Communick has started to show a little bit of healthy growth, so the risk of me being forced to shut down are as low as they ever been.

And you might also be interested in this one: https://mastodon.communick.com/@raphael/114078395548515532

And in case you are wondering, March is turning out to be even better. Conversion rate is already at 40%. Revenue has got to the point where the operation is self-sustainable.

If I feed the communities with mirrors from Reddit, people complain that they are being spammed. If I don’t, you complain that is empty.

If I say that I am running these instances on my own, people say that is a risk. If I offer them to be put under a consortium of admins, you say that “I just want others to bear the costs”.

There is no point in arguing anymore.

There is a whole instance for hardware news and reviews.

Hello from the Lemmy side of the Fediverse! I think that if you want to share a link with the group, it needs to come right after the your comment. Can you please try editing your post and swapping the mention with the link?