Personal open-source experiment — alpha stage

Yet the version number is above 1.0 . which is kinda confusing. i suggest fixing that somehow.

Is there an algorithm deciding what I see? Your home feed is the people you follow, in the order they posted. Nothing is injected, ranked, or buried to keep you scrolling. Discovery happens through hashtags, trending posts, and your server’s local timeline, all on your own terms.

At least lemmy and piefed do have algorithms. also there should be a link to github/codeberg so that people could actually provide feedback on what is wrong with the website (and generally speaking we prefer open source around here). like in fediverse party which lists the link.

This is what happened to r/fossdroid and r/opensource

I have to admit i don’t think there is a significant drop in quality in r/opensource . and honestly reddit is declining in quality as it gets more popular IMO so i am not sure correlation implies causation even if it exists.

Please don’t reply saying but Linux uses LLMs, or other whataboutisms. There is a significant difference between code quality from people submitting to Linux and a slopper who vibecoded a project thinking they’re helping.

Problem is “AI slop” basically means “bad AI code” which is subjective. i am sure the guy from xlibre thinks xorg is terrible .

Thanks for sharing this. Maybe correct tagging could be useful. Makes it easier to ignore but not overly heavy and possibly toxic.

If i am just posting these projects i found which i think are interesting (which i did a lot of). i am now suppose to spend more of my spare time researching if they include AI? I am pretty sure i won’t be able to know most of the time .

There are not a a lot of projects i think people will be interested enough to do a “high effort evaluation”. if anyone is that interested he can just ask, or check out the code which should be fairly rare.

AI has been here for a while. If it would have caused FOSS communities to be flooded by AI it probably would have happened by now. We should try and avoid the bias of risk aversion.

Looking at AI . it reminds me of how for wayland there was constant criticism even if it was just plain wrong and just made people overly scared . the plain wrong stuff was highly upvoted and i didn’t always have time to correct it, plus people being disrespectful discouraged me from discussing it because i didn’t feel it will be productive . now wayland is pretty much accepted as “good” by most of the FOSS social media communities in my experience. when a new technology appears. it takes time and effort to study it deeply and it’s advantages and disadvantages . And i suspect people in social media are often not the first to do that honestly.

I am highly skeptical this will lead to anything. i will use closed source if it’s better for me and saves me time but this does not seem like a good product (why not just use lemmy/piefed?).

Just having federation could bring more users to your site, which could lead to more ad revenue. of course some in the open source space really don’t like ads. phoronix allows to pay you to go ad free and seem to be doing ok for the last 20 years. it’s founder seems to be working full time on the site for the last 13 years. And honestly people also just use ad blockers (myself included). If you don’t block ad blocker that could also help.

It could go a long way if you will invest some of that revenue back into the fediverse and open source. valve isn’t really a open source company and steam is not open source but it seems to be liked due to investing in FOSS.

Market share of linux in canada has been gradually increasing for around 2 decades (download the CSV for a clearer representation of the data). the more popular linux becomes the more likely it is the government will switch to it (more software support, funding etc).

Shouldn’t pylova appear here? would be interesting to see if it is gaining momentum .

i look up reviews and rating on alternativeto.net , search it on openhub and sometimes add projects i might be interested it (openhub reports development activity). i sometimes search for reddit for what people say about it.

There are a bunch of websites for user reviews, but honestly i haven’t used them really iirc.

see here

I checked out this instance a while ago.

And you should care what people you don’t know on the internet think because… ?

social media is not a reliable source. it can expose you to new information, but it is not reliable .

Feedback is how you learn. how you find out what works and just as importantly what don’t work.

i think there was a study that showed that people that take a course on decision making have lower anxiety. it makes sense, once you do a risk-reward analysis and consider alternatives it makes you accept the risk and act despite it. realizing the anxiety is unhelpful or ineffective repeatedly leads to Desensitization and eventually reduces it.

with that said, there might be some underlining issue and you need to work on self regulation skills. using stuff like CBT/ACT/NSDR/meditation/stoicism. there is a open source test for the big five personality test. if you score high on neuroticism, it might indicate you should work on it.

according to the internet he has a return on investment of about 9% in the last 10 years (CAGR). msci world index (which is usually used to compare to see how well a fund performs, and has index funds which track it) made around 13.65% (so a lot higher).

So i would not put too much attention to this guys opinion, sure maybe he is taking less chances (less scary drops in the fund value that some investor don’t like) but looking at the graphs it doesn’t seems that way.

I think it’s a good to do this exercise , a lot of active investing seems like snake oil (although probably not all of it, at least according to some data and research). someone even wrote a book on the subject called “Where are the Customers’ Yachts”.

A few points:

1. MAU is a problematic indicator for the fediverse. for example misskey does not report it properly (see the github), for some open source platforms like lemmy the definition of active users is too strict IMO (i would count anyone that logged in, but that is a different discussion).

2. if you look at the growth rate of servers it is pretty good i would argue. i calculated a around 30 percent annual growth in the last few years. if this was a stock or a ETF or a pension fund this would be considered a very good growth rate IMO.

3. generalizing about the fediverse is not very useful IMO. look at specific software. when i thought of things i thought could be good for lemmy i submitted issues and things got implemented. if i can do it a lot of other people can. feedback is important.

4. you are asking people who are already satisfied with the fediverse platform they are using. which could be useful but i think you should be asking people who are not using it. find accounts you like that make you or others stay on proprietary platforms. that you think provide high quality content and ask them what they want. or even have a discussion about what features to design or experiment with. for example i saw people on r/newiran (subreddit for the opposition in iran) wanting a feature to show from which country someone posts in (like what twitter recently added). this can even just be a unofficial plugin people can install. these kind of things could provide a competitive advantage that will help people use the fediverse on top of what they want or need in proprietary platforms.

Also seems to be growing organically unlike the rest of mastodon . codeberg is also democratic and grows organically as indicated by donations.

There is some evidence this model could be beneficial. there is some research about the benefits of credit unions and housing cooperative which is also indirect evidence iirc.

I run BT Free public charity https://btfree.org/

I suggest putting it on your about page. i personally try to limit my time trying to contribute to FOSS. seeing that someone is a actual contributor helps prioritize how to try to help. i assume other people have a similar approach.

maybe Mastodon has the most users (idk)

Probably

can they get them out to vote?

My assumption is that if someone is willing to pay and support FOSS he is going to be more thoughtful. There is a risk that just newer platform might not be well known yet so they will get less votes despite being superior. maybe have people give a score on a scale of 1-100 like the ACSI and if a platforms say have one percent of the votes and has the highest average it is selected. if this will gather interest and will go on for a few years different approaches could be tried. and you could do polls asking the community what to do . you could set up some kind of paywalled community, i think discord and patreon has that feature but maybe there is a open source alternative (mitra?).

Nice job growing your instance BTW.

Similarweb reports a estimate of the total visits in a month. lemmy.world report says “520,592” total visits which is a lot (more then a website in my country i visit relatively frequently).

That of course does not indicate the quality of the interactions which is obviously important ( i still spend time on reddit, but the quality of interaction in youtube for example is better then reddit and even lemmy for me because it has actual experts in it TBH).

One way it is measured is by customer satisfaction, where for example for social media bluesky currently gets the highest score at least as measured by the ACSI. with pinterest and youtube in the second place. but the scores aren’t that high (bluesky is at 82/100).

Other then that there are various awards, like the oscars or the emmy. Maybe we need a fediverse platform of the year award and fediverse instance of the year award. People could have to donate some money to vote so there won’t be a risk of too many bots gaming it and the money could be used to fund the instance/platform or fund the marketing of it. but i don’t know if enough people are interested in that.

I guess maybe set up a community on lemmy. have the client automatically make posts to it. or comments to a specific post?

Or maybe have a bot clients will send messages to?

Lemmy has a bunch of libraries for automation so that could be used to extract the information you need for the test.

Of course that probably makes it easier to feed fake data (e.g. if china wants to make lemmy.ml more popular).

Pretty sure you want to use the AGPL and not GPL.

The ideal IMO will be some kind of experiment (probably something you should opt in). give people feeds and have them be ranked on a 1-10 scale and see which is better and do a Statistical hypothesis test to make sure the differences are not due to luck.

That is also a product of many variables (including software quality). maybe time to go back to the drawing board.

For this project I’m mainly testing distribution models

What do you expect to learn from those so called tests? (no offence)

The big questions in closed vs open is that there are different scenarios :

for closed source -> less competitor -> more users -> more money -> more investment in the project -> better product.

for open source -> more users want to use it and contribute to it -> better software -> more users -> more potential for making money.

The problem is that for the outcomes you want to track (more money or better software). there are so many variable involved that influence those outcomes so it’s hard to deduce that the license is improving the outcomes or making them worst.

It’s another case of OSPNS - Open source projects names sucking .