Alien civilizations? No. No evidence to support this. But alien life form like bacteria and other organisms? Possible, but still, evidence is scant. It’s difficult for some to accept that we are alone but the lack of evidence suggests a very strong possibility that there’s nothing out there.

Unfortunately, no as far as I know. I personally think this should be the answer rather than Defederation. I’m not sure where to make a feature request for lemmy but I’m not sure why this hasn’t been suggested before.

Woah!!! That’s actually quite fast and unexpected. I guess that answers the question of discoverability. The remaining question is then, how?

And can it be replicated to other posts? It would be amazing if anyone who posts a question in google is given a link to lemmy.

[email protected]

Try to see if this works.

Sorry. I’m still new to lemmy myself. :(

It’s not so much as a deal breaker. The green bubbles means you’re using regular text, hence in some countries, there may be big charges as opposed to blue which is kind of like your regular instant messaging where it’s free as long as you have wifi or data.

Have a separate account on burggit.moe and lemmynsfw for this exact reason. Plus a lot of alt accounts on instances that are defederated (different usernames for each).

I don’t know if this is counted but it’s also perfectly reasonable to have accounts on defederated instances. So if this is counted that might inflate the numbers a bit.

It is unfortunate that we have to choose between the two. The idea of FOSS should be not paying and not being the product.

If you look at my original post I mentioned I have proton mail. What I wasn’t aware was if there were free providers as in lemmy.world where it’s free, without subscription, or free from any profitization.

It was discussed heavily in the comments that self hosting only brings problem.

I also conceded that there are no free alternatives apart from hosting your own. That’s why I agreed that protonmail is the next best thing. What I didn’t agree with it is its subscription model and hence its lack of protection against being profit-driven.

That too, I conceded. Someone mentioned tildes.team and I may start looking into that next.

Tldr: I understand that there are email providers available but most are still owned by companies, hence there will still be a time when we have to pay for them, as opposed to say, donation and community-driven.

Thank you for explaining. I grew up on php-based forums and websites. So Rust is pretty new to me. TBH, I haven’t heard of it until Lemmy. :)

I agree, the free option is very serviceable as a backup personal email. Though there will always be a part of me that is skeptical if these free services will disappear one day.

That said, I wouldn’t put everything in one basket. As I recall, their VPN is slow and their cloud storage has no mobile apps. Though that might have changed since I last tried the Proton suite.

Oh wow. I didn’t know this was a thing. Will check this out for sure.

They often provide free services to its members such as email, website/gopher/gemini hosting, coding tools, and many other useful utilities.

This has me really really interested. Thanks for giving more awareness to this :)

You’ve probably set your feed to show active posts rather than new or something else. This has been getting some comments as far as I can see, so that might have pushed it higher in your feed.

I was a bit surprised myself. I’m a lurker on reddit but addicted to lemmy. Can’t explain it. But I’m glad I’m here to witness this. :)

Image now replaced with a cropped one. I didn’t want complaints of an edited/altered screenshot so I didn’t alter it at first.

That’s an interesting take. If reddit can claim victory, it would be a hollow one, even if the remaining mods do cave.

To be honest, proton is quite expensive for what it gives. Though this might differ depending on income levels and level of comfort. But their free version is serviceable enough if your email volume isn’t that high.

On your last point, no worries. That is a valid point and yeah, that is exactly what I’m getting at. It’s either use a free service that might disappear or pay a subscription.

I think we can do better, as in the same vein of FOSS where the service is crowd funded and funded by donations.

I know there are paid solutions and that’s fine. But again those run the risk of disappearing or charging more or pivoting business strategies. So many things could go wrong with a paid service.

But with a community initiative, there’s more checks and balances and while not everyone contributes, there’s less likely that a service will become worse over time as demands for profit increases.

Hmmm you have a lot of good points. Decentralizing my accounts would be a good starting point. Will need to track more email accounts but then that’s what a good password manager is for.

Yeah I guess. But yahoo, tutanota, proton mail, hotmail, etc. all answer to a company. I was hoping for a more permanent solution which I think could either be

1. Fediverse not requiring email to sign up

Or

2. A community or non profit email service that is not tied to one company but owned by many.

I guess proton mail will be the next best thing but there’s the fear that they too will not remain free forever.

This is what I am afraid of. Because all major providers are companies in the end and they need to make a profit. So there may be a time when we really have to host our own email (not all of us can easily do)

I don’t know, maybe, I am just disillusioned in general that I am starting to look for community alternatives rather than provided by big companies. At least right now we have plan B like proton mail and the rest. But if the trend continues, the pessimist in me fears the time where everyone would have to self host email, or subscribe to a big provider and submit to their rules.

I shudder to think about the idea of emails becoming subscription services though.

I actually didn’t know that. So in the off chance that gmail fails or if it becomes too unbearable to use, the solution is to buy a domain and host your own email?

Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.

I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).

By requiring invites, they are already punishing people not the abusers as their philosophy states

Trust people, but punish abusers

By gatekeeping. And making it difficult for people to join, it assumes that everyone is a criminal/troublemaker until proven by a some sort of vetting process.

Reminds me of when malls used to check your pockets for stolen goods before your exit. The assumption of guilt sours the whole experience.

Threads got to me late. The moment it was advertised, I’m in too deep the lemmy hole.

I vaguely recall a discussion on Tildes with that sentiment on tildes. So thank you for the reminder of their blatant elitism.

https://tildes.net/~tech/16bm/beehaw_org_defederating_effective_immediately_from_lemmy_world_and_sh_itjust_works

This one I think. And scrolling through it now renewed that bitter taste in my mouth.

Ahh that’s the FB feature that I’ve been taking for granted. I guess I’m so used to always posting “public” in my facebook that I don’t think about it. My more private photos are on instagram and that’s on private, too. I mostly use facebook for professional uses. Well that and I am deligent with my friend list.

You can also follow people which is more twitter territory but facebook allows that too. It has a private messaging feature too. I guess those along with the microblogging features can make it a viable competitor to facebook if given the chance to mature. All it needs perhaps is a dedicated friends list and magazines can be repurposed to groups. Maybe pages and it would be a full fb experience.

I guess that is a solution. But I agree creating a new account means starting over, looking for communities once again and maybe your post history, plus the hassle of having to manage two separate accounts. I guess the issue of fragmentation in the fediverse needs to be addressed too as it matures.

That’s true. Though the fear of defederation (and in turn isolation) is always there. I wish they make it so that the users, not the admin chooses which instance to defederate. But maybe this is too tedious to implement.

Not sure as to the actual statistics. But for me, lemmy feels more active than kbin. Though that in itself is subjective. I do like the interface of kbin for sure. But lemmy feels more active so I’m conflicted. Will explore more communities to see if this view holds true though.

Hmmm I guess this is the beauty if the fediverse, we can always jump to another ship within the federation. I just wish they’d find ways to connect one username for everything.

You’re right. The microblog on Kbin is very tempting. But it’s sluggish right now, at least for me. So I’ll probably still make lemmy my home base and keep an eye on kbin. I definitely see its potential as an alternative facebook or tumblr or even twitter if it can’t compete as a reddit alternative.

It’s still in the fediverse but like you, I’ll be keeping my eye on my kbin.social account, as well. :)

On closer look, I think Kbin feels more like an alternative to facebook or tumblr than to reddit, although it has its own “communities” as well. Though once federation matures, I guess it won’t matter too much.

Thanks will give kbin a second look. Already made an account there just to “reserve” my username :)

Although to be fair, initial impressions are quite good already. :)

In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.

Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.

Thank you for the explanation. :) that does gives a clearer picture.

So it seems that lemmy just happens to be the most ready when the mass migration happened.

Out of curiosity, I made an account on kbin and it feels more feature rich, albeit a bit sluggish. Might give it another try soon. It feels like it could be a fediverse alternative for Facebook more so rather than reddit.

I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.

Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.