I still think universities and academic societies should be hosting instances and funding them with dedicated endowments. It’d also provide a great way to request more money from people who feel a reciprocal obligation due to using the instance.

Right! Plus, it’d be an ideal route to solicit donations to the university - people are more attached to their social media than sports ball teams. Not hosting lemmy and mastadon instances is practically throwing away money!

While I don’t disagree with the transparency Mozilla is advocates, I think it fails to address the underlying problem then tries to compensate by picking and choosing winners (which arguably is the same as the underlying problem). The underlying problem is the ad-incentivized watchtime algorithm, which isn’t a technical issue but a financing one.

I’ve been an advocate of endowments for a long time, but this is just another area where they’d be ideal. They supply a small steady income to support a relatively cheap product. As the website grows you can either do temporary ads to grow the endowment or ask for donations. Either way, it’s not that hard to fund operations this small. Add in federated systems like lemmy and each individual operation is even smaller and cheaper.

Heck, universities who are already accustom to dealing with endowments would be ideal places to host lemmy instances. I can definitely imagine offering to donate 10k to an endowment dedicated to hosting a lemmy and mastadon instance with open to registration to students, staff, and alumni. Maybe coordinate with the computer science and IT folks. Allow some percentage of the endowment income to go to “salary overhead” while the rest just funds the server. Point out that the university would essentially be creating the perfect route to solicit donations and they might do it themselves… Honestly, I’m probably gonna flesh this idea out and email the people at my university because it’s just too perfect of a solution.

There was a similar post recently about Cambridge leaving twitter, and it got me thinking that universities are really the ideal organizations to host lemmy servers. They have a vested interest in truth and community building. They have a decent enough sense of free speech to stay federated with most other instances. They have pre-existing communities on topic ranging from clubs to technical subjects. Users can confirm their identities by association with the universities, which will keep things civil. Obviously I don’t think they should be the only instances - anonymity has it’s place and value - but I really think universities should be hosting instances.

They probably will, but I think the intentional violators are intending to make a spectacle out of it. I suspect California Voters will have it repealed in short order, but in the mean time the world should probably ruthlessly mock and isolate them.

Ads were always a terrible way to fund the internet.

Not to rant, but some things are so cheap or so important (or both) that it’s foolish not to operate off an endowment system. The internet, journalism, science – the information foundation of the modern world has to be independent for a stable society. Like, yeah, capitalism bad and establishing an initial investment is asking a lot of people’s finances, but surely operating independently is worth it?

It is either puppies or genocide, no in-between

puppy genocide?

I love the level of disdain the linux community has for this kinda bootlicking.