The golden rule got demoted to silver? Damn, times are tough all over.

No. Read it carefully;

- Golden Rule: treat others in the way you would like to be treated

- Silver Rule: don't treat others in a way you would not like to be treated.

The difference is subtle, but important.

I'm sorry, the double negative there is making it very difficult for me to parse and understand the distinction you're pointing out.

The main point is that the Silver Rule states that it is more important to avoid harm than to try to do something that you think is positive.

Another way to put it: when in doubt, don't interact.

https://gonen.blog/the-golden-rule-vs-the-silver-rule/

I see now. Thank you.

Don't treat others in (a way you would not like to be treated).

You can parse the sentence by evaluating the parenthesis first, "a way you would not like to be treated.". Let's think of a few ways you would not like to be treated. I don't want other people to

* Scream at me

* Insult me

* Put words in my mouth.

Then it says "don't treat others" in such a way.

A gotcha here is that not liking something is not exactly logical inverse of liking something. Liking something means positive feelings. Not liking something means negative feelings. Feeling neutral is a third category, not included in either.

An oversimplification which might make it easier to understand that rule: Don't mistreat others.

There is also the platinum rule. "Treat others the way they want to be treated"

Ok. I'd like to be treated like a King. I am expecting your full support in providing whatever I desire, no questions asked.

That's why it's the platinum rule. There are people who genuinely attempt to abide by this rule and they can be great assets to a community as long as they are not getting trampled over.

The worst thing about ActivityPub and federation is the hefty resources it costs to run them. Same issue with Matrix.

It’s impossible to make a profitable business hosting servers For people because of how horrifyingly inefficient they are.

$5 for the lowest tier for all apps on spacebear. If you want all apps that’s like $20 per month. This is the future the fediverse wants? That’s awful.

Decentralization is not resource-efficient and its cost per unit will be always higher than any centralized alternative. That is a given. It is the cost of having all that redundancy and flexibility. You can not reach economies of scale easily.

With that said, I believe prices will go down for B2C. A few reasons why I believe so:

- Some of these services will consolidate into larger offerings and make a more featureful service. Pixelfed is already experimenting with a different frontend where users can share more than just photos (UI-wise, it looks a lot like early/cool Tumblr)

- A larger number of professional providers that will run instances in the same way that people were running email providers. With Communick I can run Matrix, Mastodon and XMPP and I am charging $5/10 users/3 months during the "soft launch/beta" phase, which is basically $0.17/user/month and will let me hit break even point with less than a hundred paid accounts. I can increase this 10-fold and it still wouldn't be as expensive as any of the current major providers.

- Media storage costs completely dominate the rest of other infra expenses, and IPFS can save the day here. It's not hard to imagine an architecture where servers provide only a cache layer for media serving and the less-accessed data lives on users' clients.

- The real money is in hosting for business/enterprise/white-labeling anyway. As much as I want Communick to be successful and I hope I start getting more people to "get it", I am using it as lab to make sure that I can offer a reliable media presence / communication service for companies, and then "Communick B2C" would be mostly a loss-leader.

I absolutely agree. It’s just a messaging protocol. There’s no reason for all of these apps to be so niche.

And I agree that there’s no inherent reason that all of the current servers are terribad. Although it is strange that everyone interested in decentralization seems to also be interested in bad technology. Though of course this is slowly changing as reality sets in.

Communick sounds interesting. If you can really bundle all those apps together for that cheap? It makes me wonder why Element Matrix hosting is such a ripoff. Or why every other host is such a ripoff.

I agree about IPFS too. Specifically though I’d like to see Sia used as storage because it’s actually working today as opposed to Filecoin and all that which is not close to functioning yet.

Oh who cares. Joe Blow is not going to run their own fediverse server.

You know who will, and don't care about the resource usage? Organizations.

> You know who will, and don't care about the resource usage? Organizations.

They won't because it's too inefficient to even make sense. You're running it as a loss. You're better off paying for a service that is profitable like Slack.

For example, a lot of people are pushing for colleges to run matrix and give every student an account, just like they do with email.

If they did that, they'd be sunk financially though lol.

Even if organizations did run fediverse servers, that defeats the whole point of the fediverse. I don't even know why I'm writing this comment though, because I'm proven right be the fact that the activitypub team is working to solve the very issues that I am talking about. So they clearly think it's a problem and agree with me.

I don't advertise my instance, it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU, but I have the same policy.

I'm as left as left gets, my family and friends are made up of several activists. But I also am annoyed with how hate speech and right wing people are moderated.

My opinion is that they should first of all be reasoned with. And if you can't reason with them then each user may block them on their own.

But to just block their entire instance, or "Gab", is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them. That goes against my core principles.

I agree with you in theory, but in practice I just don't want to spend my time on social media arguing with someone so fundamentally ideologically opposed to me.

Sure, I could block the users individually, but I prefer to just use an instance that de-federates from cesspools of such users.

I know what you mean. I picked someone from the public timeline a few days ago and started to try and make sense of their argument.

Within just a few back and forths I realized that this person was either just bored and trolling, or I was unable to understand their perspective and it was relentless.

I still didn't block them, or their instance. I saw their message in the public timeline, it didn't arrive directly to me in any way.

I prefer to spend my time arguing with catgirls over the correct spelling of nya over spending that time seeing people discuss my extermination. You do you.

How do you reckon the seemingly contradictory statements in your post?

1) "...it also blocks registrations from anyone outside of EU"

2) "But to just block their entire instance...is to sweep a bunch of HUMANS under the carpet and not even attempt to communicate with them"

Unless your instance is specifically dedicated to taking action in EU politics are you not sweeping a bunch of humans under the carpet and not even attempting to communicate with them by blocking everyone outside of the EU from talking to you?

Forgive me if I missed something, I am just truly curious because you don't see some seemingly contradictory statements in close proximity often which makes it likely I am just missing some core fact.

You simply don't have all the information.

My instance is a Swedish one, it's aimed at Swedish users. In the 1st few months of operation I was getting a lot of spam users registering and noticed this was a wide spread issue among instance admins.

So I made the decision to use a basic GeoIP block on the path used to register new accounts, blocking all IPs outside of EU to make the area wide in order to avoid blocking Swedes.

This caused my spam to go down to zero. At the same time I use several ActivityPub relay servers that make my public timeline so active that you can see posts appear every second. I'm quite happy with this solution and consider it a good method to use in general with federation.

I'd much rather see smaller localized communities using AP relaying to stay in touch with each other, than huge monolithic instances that vacuum up all the users.

What I mean when I say that you shouldn't block entire instances from federating just because of a few hateful users is that they're being blocked from the public timeline. Not being blocked from registering.