Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter’s performance/federation issues.
If you want game-related communities, I can create them for you on https://level-up.zone and make you a moderator.
(OT: this decision of only allowing users of an instance to create communities is one of the things that I dislike the most about Lemmy. I am seriously considering creating a separate service to let people request communities on instances without an account)
Oh neat. I’ve never even seen that instance before. I was thinking at some point I might get around to creating an aoe4 community too, and possibly creating an aoe2 one on a less controversial instance than the current [email protected] (and with a mod who’s not inactive). But I’ve my hands full already so I won’t be doing that too soon.
Is that a video game instance? Because if so, that’s a great idea.
Yeah, I have created a bunch of topic-based instances with the idea of having communities created in “neutral ground” and avoiding issues like “instance from instance Z has defederated from X and Y, so now the people need to create duplicate communities and/or duplicate accounts”.
The whole list of instances is on the sidebar of [email protected] if you are interested.
Also, because I got someone reporting me for not “disclosing my interests”. Communick is a business. It makes money by providing paid access accounts to Fediverse services, like communick.news and mastodon.communick.com. These topic-based instances however are never going to be closed or exclusive to paying customers. Anyone that wants to create a new community based on a specific interest, just send me a DM and I will happily create it and make you a moderator. I created them to help organize communities during the migration and to distribute the load from all the mirrored content from alien.top.
Yeah I really like the idea of topic-based instances. There are some issues doing it that way with discovery, and potentially with what happens when communities split (see for example what happened with [email protected] splitting to [email protected]), but on the whole I really like the way it can reduce the drama caused by entirely unrelated factors. I’m a big fan of ttrpg.network for that reason, and I guess you could describe my main home instance of aussie.zone as being one, too.
I’m curious about that business. With so many Mastodon and other fediverse instances available for free to anyone, what’s the business model for a paid service?
Nice, I went ahead and created [email protected] . As soon as you make a post there I can make you a moderator as well.
I’m really glad to see more people getting the point of these instances. Reducing drama is certainly one of the biggest factors, and “good fences make good neighbors” is a good principle here.
what’s the business model for a paid service
It’s a difficult one, if I am being honest. I started this as a side project because I believed that with all the abuses from Facebook and Twitter, people would finally understand that “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product” is not just a nice slogan. Unfortunately, it seems that the large majority of people will rather live jumping from instance to instance and project to project instead of paying a few bucks per month to support independent developers.
But to give you a more cheerful response, Communick is not just about Fediverse. My background is in telecommunications, and the idea is to offer any type of service for messaging that is based on open standards, which also includes VoIP. It also provides Matrix and I’ve been trying to figure out how I can add support for SIP calling in a way that could make this a compelling alternative for Digital nomads that need to deal with multiple phone numbers.
Looking at the Fediverse only, some reasons to charge for access:
- it is a lot easier to handle moderation. Trolls and spammers are not willing to pay a few bucks per month when they can do it for free in the open instances.
- the instances never get oversubscribed. I only need to invest in more infrastructure if I have more customers. All of the “free” instances end up invariably having to close registrations, or to beg for donations or simply crumble under their own weight.
- I strongly believe that charging a bit from everyone is more fair than asking big donations from some people to make up for the freeloaders.
- There should be enough people out there who know how much their time is worth and understand the value proposition to make this a sustainable business.
- Because of federation, network effects are not a huge deal. A theoretical centralized social network with tens of thousand users is pretty much dead, but Communick can be relevant to its customers even when we are super small.
I appreciate it, and if I ever do get around to doing something about aoe2 or aoe4 I may use that instance, or if I see someone else express interest in creating game-related communities I’ll recommend they head in your direction. But for now I’ve already created it on this instance, and don’t see the benefits as being strong enough to outweigh that.
Also, because I got someone reporting me for not “disclosing my interests”.
Thank you for addressing this
I don’t mind the suspicion, but I think it is beyond silly.
I’m one self-funded developer who is stubborn enough to run this at a loss for almost 5 years now, and my greatest ambition here would be to maybe get 10-15k customers to pay me $30/year to be able to live with minimal comfort, provide for my family and hopefully contribute back to open source and the open web. Yet people want to paint me as some mastermind behind some huge corporation burning money around from investors and looking for a way to exploit users.
I’m honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it’s a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It’s also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don’t pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business, but go look at the phones in their hands and there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.
there is an 80% chance they will be holding a shiny new iPhone.
Really not sure about this on Lemmy.
live with minimal comfort, provide for my family
Are you unhappy with your current job? It feels like all admins are doing this as a hobby, and none of them plan to make money out of it
What current job?
I started Communick as a side-project in the end of 2019, but in July of last year I lost my job and decided to make this really work.
Now I get more why you are pushing so hard to make it profitable.
Have you considered finding another job in the meantime? The Fediverse isn’t going to be profitable any time soon
OP’s link is bad - they’ve created a direct link to the community on lemm.ee and named that link [email protected], rather than just typing [email protected]. Lemmy and PieFed can both handle the link, but it seems that Mbin is struggling with it.
A proper ! link should work on Mbin - you’ve previously said that Mbin has been configured to point ! links to ‘/search?’, so an unknown community gets resolved.
As for solving the problem of Lemmy throwing a generic error page whilst its backend is busy resolving unknown communities, that’s a UX issue for the devs to fix, or for the users to know that they need to press ‘refresh’.
That both Mbin and Lemmy have a ‘/search’ endpoint is more of a coincidence than anything - I don’t think it can be relied upon to provide some kind of universal ‘fediverse link’ (and I’m not just saying that because PieFed has no clue what to do with your link!)
OP’s link is bad - they’ve created a direct link to the community on lemm.ee and named that link [email protected], rather than just typing [email protected].
That’s how Lemmy does by default if you use the autocompletion built in the interface.
Probably something to raise to the devs
they’ve created a direct link to the community on lemm.ee and named that link [email protected], rather than just typing [email protected]
I just used the autocomplete built into Lemmy after typing
!aom. It works just fine. If I click it on this account it takes me to https://lemm.ee/c/aom, if I click it on my main account it takes me to https://aussie.zone/c/[email protected]. Which is the desired behaviour.Yeah, sorry, Blaze explained after how it happens, so my comment was more critical than it should have been. Anyway, the point of all this extra chat on what should just be some community promo, was that the link format that - it turns out - Lemmy autogens is fine for you, and fine for me, but not for MBIN users (who’s solution seems to be proposing an entirely different and untested link format for everyone else to use)
I’m confused, isn’t that just a two-step version of the link I provided?
Mbin and others might have issues with Lemmy created links
But shouldn’t the plain [email protected] be enough? Not sure about the link above, I’ve seen original lucifer post those before, never really investigated why
the target community may not exist with a direct link as youve posted.
when you push it through what seems to be a universal search url: /search?q=!community @ host . tld, it forces the remote host to create the community should it not already exist.
Oh wow, I didn’t even realise you could do relative links like that in Lemmy.
It’s a shame post IDs aren’t globally unique so you could do something like that with individual posts.
It’s a shame post IDs aren’t globally unique so you could do something like that with individual posts.
As you can search for posts and find them in a similar way, that could actually work
Yeah sort of, but it’s not quite as convenient as me being able to take lemm.ee/post/41243313 and change it to aussie.zone/post/41243313. Obviously, for that to work, the IDs would have to be non-sequential: probably the easiest/dumbest way to do it would be with UUIDs, which are pretty massive to use in a URL, so I don’t really blame the designers for doing it how they did. But it would be nice.
the target community may not exist with a direct link as youve posted.
Indeed, I’m just used to refresh if it’s the case, after the refresh the community is there. Interesting to see a link that does that on its own
Mbin user here, link in the OP kicks me to lemm.ee while originallucifer’s link lets me find it on Mbin
Interesting, what about mine?
Yours also allows me to open it on Mbin.
I didn’t know they were making a new Age of Mythology game! That’s awesome!
It’s not so much a new game as a remaster of the old game. Back in like 2016 they announced they were making Age of Empires 4 and also “Definitive Editions” of 1, 2, and 3. The DEs came out in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and AoE2 and 3 DE were both really good and successful. Then a couple of years ago they announced Age of Mythology was getting a similar treatment. It came out for people who ordered the Premium Edition last Wednesday, and releases to the general audience tomorrow. So far it’s been a massive success critically both in mainstream gaming press and with Age players.
edit: AoE2 DE did a fantastic job of unifying disparate communities. Before it, most low-level casuals played on the 2013 HD edition and most high-level and pro players played on Voobly with fan patches based on the original CD version of the game. After DE, everyone plays DE. The same seems to be coming true for AoM. Previously there was a split between Voobly and the 2014 “Extended Edition” (which also included some very controversial patches around 2016 to coincide with an equally-controversial expansion DLC). But already it seems as though people are embracing the “Retold” edition of the game, whether casual or pro.
Do you want the Fediverse to be a soup kitchen or do you want to be as good as of a dining experience as it can be?
Feel free to advocate for your vision as much as you like, but it seems the audience here isn’t very receptive.
You are avoiding a question and using “other people” as a distraction, instead of commiting yourself to an opinion.
It is not the first time that you do that. Why?
I’m not, you are the one trying to present me as if I’m not discussing in good faith.
My point is that, if people were receptive to your proposition (I know you posted about Communick in the past), they would subscribe to it, and then we wouldn’t have the conversation we had in the last few days.
Based on your comments and the stats on your flagship instance, it doesn’t seem to be the case, which is why I said that the audience doesn’t seem very receptive.
Seems quite logical to me, and nothing my personal opinion has any impact on.
The question you are evading is simple: is your vision for the Fediverse something where everyone will be only working altruistically and that we should serve users who are purely out of a sense of community/charity (the soup kitchen model) or do you think there is value in paying professionals their market rate in order to get a service with better support, integrate new features and will have a vested interest in providing a superior experience (the “people go to restaurants and pay more than the cost of the food” model)?
Haven’t we discussed this question at length recently?
You actually never answered my last comment, which answers tour question, so maybe you missed it: https://feddit.org/comment/1871850
You have a lengthy comment indeed, but it does not mean that you are answering the question I made: do you think that the Fediverse can be “successful” only via “pure” communal efforts, or do you think that it needs professionals to work on it and who should be properly appraised - ii.e, be paid according to market rate?
Taking 30$ per year as a reference point as this is your pricing on Communick (I know it also involves Mastodon and Matrix, but there is no Lemmy only package anymore, so that’s the only option), this is too high and goes against the philosophy of free software.
Does your Linux distribution ask you for a yearly fee for development and maintenance costs?
Does F-droid ask you for a yearly fee?
Grayjay?
On the other hand, some people paid for Sync, so there is still an part of the Lemmy population who is ready to pay for software, but Sync is a polished product they knew they could trust quality wise.
![Created a new community, [email protected], for the newly-released Age of Mythology game](https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/dd83454c-ef5f-4465-8510-01c371dc9dbe.jpeg){kind=link}