benefit your administrative influence from your instances

They are not going to be "my" instances.

acknowledging any objective perspectives.

Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.

I don't need/want to make money out of these instances, I am just commoditizing the complements.

• Your key is your identity. If it's lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.

• Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub

• Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.

• (not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis

A type of federation where there is no "home" for a community any more.

This is not federation anymore, but an entirely different architecture. Nostr works like this, but it also has its flaws.

Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.

I am not trying to be mean, it's just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.

So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple

Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.

Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?

You don't need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.

It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.

But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?

I can't even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.

If you want communities to be resistant to server removal

Another non-sequitur.

So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy

How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?

In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy

Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?

From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.

Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.

I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don't want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.

Please, spare me from the cheap rhetoric.

I've been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.

Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.

It's tiring and frustrating.

Sorry, I can not let go of this. I don't know if you realized that the whole reason that I am doing this is because you kept pushing this idea that you'd be more than willing to contribute to different instances and that the only thing that is stopping you is that you'd be worried about me being the only person.

Even with me telling you that I have other people to take over my operations, you were doubting me.

Now that I am actually going forward and offering to get more people onboard, while asking for NOTHING in return, you are putting this bullshit, pretending to be worried about price of domains.

What you are doing is just Concern Trolling, and I am frankly tired of this. You have put no Skin in the Game, yet you continue to find ways to rationalize your senseless idea that this is going to grow magically without getting people to put significant resources at stake.

There are plenty of ways where people can enter into an equity agreement without having to pay directly with money.

can take over should something happen to you

Are you trying to get rid of me? Then why are you arguing as if (a) something bad might happen to me or (b) I am somehow unable/unfit to manage this?

No matter what I do/offer/propose, you will always try to find an excuse to rationalize your unwillingness to contribute to what I am doing, like I'm failing some type of BS purity test.

Which part of "I am not asking for financial support" is not clear from the blog post?

Stop thinking in terms of prices, and start thinking in terms of value. A three-letter domain for less than 1000€ is a bargain.

To be precise, I'm willing to give up some ownership. I still want to participate in its governance.

someone else’s hardware?

If a new consortium is formed and if the collective decision is to move it, yes. If the decision is to keep as it is, also fine.

Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.

This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.

without putting any work or money into it.

Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.

I'm not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don't mind keep running them.

It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize

First, we'd have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is starting now to be shared by other prominent figures in the Fediverse.

Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I'd hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.

aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.

Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don't have an account in the same server.

the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.

There are two different, orthogonal issues here:

1. people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
2. people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.

The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.

People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.

Not my experience. A few examples:

• No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I've witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
• Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to "choose" between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
• Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.

That's an argument that is:

• application specific
• agency-removing (only Lemmy devs can do something about)
• orthogonal to the stated problem

It's amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.

I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing "you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?", even though I'm running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of "community-based instances" .

Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.

"rendezvous instances" is a perfect term for them...

1. I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.

2. When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.

At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics

I'm not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a "there can be only one" mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.