Take a look at https://communick.com/lemmy, I don’t have an automated way to import an existing instance but if you have a backup of your media and database we can work something out.

Meanwhile, Google/Alphabet is announcing today record revenues of U$ 100 billion for the latest quarter alone…

The less the community support smaller, independent service providers, the more we will all be assimilated by the Borg.

Federation is not the natural unit of organization, that’s a hill I’m ready to die on. The problem is that most people get hung up on the idea of instances because they’ve only experienced the two extremes of siloed networks and the “Dark Forest” of blockchain.

I think the most interesting opportunity here is that ATProto’s strength is that it was built for a “credible exit”, i.e, it allows users to migrate from any centralized network to a decentralized one.

IOW, it would be a lot easier to implement Fediverser on top of ATProto than of ActivityPub.

There are a lot of architecture astronauts that will keep talking about “we should develop a grand-unifying system”, but most of them are all talk and little result.

When push comes to shove, the developers that actually ship are the ones that look at problem they want to solve and work on that.

Yes, it is possible.

Whether enough people want it is a different story, and most developers are stuck in the app store mentality, so it gets difficult to get enough support for this to move faster.

Maybe we should introduce a gated API and charge $12 for 50k requests…

Not sure if there’s a legit use for just fetching only comments outside of a post

The ability to see all comments is right there at the Lemmy UI.

you never said it.

The whole conversation started with me talking about Communick offering a subscription service. Communick is my business. I thought that was clear. My bad if it wasn’t.

“Hey, I run a business, something like this would probably cost X per year and I think I would have Y users. Which would mean I’d minimally have to charge Z to make this viable”

That’s not a good approach, because Y changes depending on the price point and X changes on what these Y customers would expect from the service.

The only variable that can be fixed here is “how much you are willing to pay”, so this is why I am asking it.

In case you didn’t notice, I have a hosting business. This is why I’m “obsessed” in figuring out how much someone would pay for it, if they were serious about what they are asking.

By asking you “how much would you pay?”, I’m trying to gauge how serious you are about it. Your refusal to go ahead and name any amount for something that you said “I’d pay for that” shows me that you are not serious about it and therefore a bad idea.

I want a kebab shop down the street. You gonna demand I tell you how much I’d pay for a kebab

No, I will look at kebab shops in your area and see how much they are charging, and I will check if their operation is actually profitable (instead of being a front for someone who needs to launder money) and I will see if they have enough customers paying the asking price. If the math checks out and if I see an opportunity for the market, then I’d go invest time and resources to open a shop there.

There is no such thing for “hosting providers that have been audited and can certify that the data is secured and properly managed”. And given you are the first person saying “I’d pay for that”, why do you think is somehow offensive to be asked “How much?”

Someone sees a potential opportunity (…) does the research,

Yeah, part of the research is exactly going to potential customers and asking how much are you willing to pay for this?.

Seriously, I do not get what is so weird about asking it.

I’m not going to go out there and do extensive business research

I didn’t ask you to do any research. You said “I’d legitimately would pay for it.” and I asked one simple question: how much?

The economic viability I leave to anyone that wants to take it on.

This attitude right here is why the Fediverse is bound to stay small and amateurish. Everyone is just focused on keeping their own little pipe dreams and wishing that someone else to take on the sacrifice to do these gigantic efforts without expecting any reward.

You didn’t respond the second part: how much are you willing to pay for this? Anything less than $100k/year and I will guarantee you there is no serious provider who will care about being certified for it, and any who is willing to pay that much money surely will be better off by running their instance on their own.

I would love to see hosts start offering subscription based instances

Communick offers access to Mastodon, Lemmy, Funkwhale and Matrix for $29/year

I’d legitimately pay for that.

How much? “Regular auditing of the infrastructure” seems like a very enterprise-y thing to expect from a basic SaaS.

so I could have a frontend that scraped every comment and then every like of every comment in a community

Or you could do the same thing that https://lemvotes.org/ does and follow the communities and actors to build this database on a separate server, which then can be used by the client(s).

What keeps most of them away from free software is that they can’t write a contract with anyone with clear boundaries and guarantees.

They can. There are plenty of companies offering Mastodon hosting.

The code is AGPL. They can’t do open core.

Have you considered taking the approach from https://phanpy.social/, and let the sorting algorithms on the client side?

Not only would make your work independent from Lemmy, it would give you complete freedom to choose how to implement this.

But then why do you worry about the ap_id patterns from other software?

So, I’ve rewritten the search / search boxes in Tesseract to skip the search and directly resolve activity pub URLs for users, posts, comments, and communities. I’m loving this as it makes things so much faster and easier.

Isn’t that the whole point of webfinger? Moreover, why would you paint yourself into a corner and hardcode the logic for all the different types of services, if ActivityPub uses JSON-LD and therefore provides a straightforward method for document dereferencing?

I’m not trying to be snarky. It’s just that I’m writing ActivityPub server where the id of each object is just an ULID, because to the server there is zero difference between serving the information about an actor or an activity.