The money thing is definitely an issue… when lemmy’s NLNet grant runs out, we will need to transition to a more sustainable model.
The best option for open source projects like this one to stay alive, is subscriptions (which we already have via liberapay and opencollective). I really like what tasks.org has to say about it:
I know you hate subscriptions. I don’t like them either.
Mobile apps must be maintained and supported forever, and one-time purchases are not an effective method of funding development¹. When one-time sales dry up then developers abandon the app. Subscriptions give them an incentive to keep you happy.
Thanks <3
For me at least, the burnout comes from the fact that I want to code, not troubleshoot. I want to make new features, build snazzy front ends, and not have to worry about money.
But as lemmy’s gotten more popular, a big chunk of my time is spent doing the things the article mentions: responding to an endless stream of notifications that builds faster than you can close them, helping debug people’s system setups, address people’s odd use-case pet features they want, and troubleshoot other issues.
Many times people can be very rude, not realizing they’re asking you to do free labor for them. Its very similar to how some people treat restaurant servers as their personal servants.
Federated communities do show up both on the search page, and the communities page.
This is a really good question.
For micro-blogging, the only one of those that’s internal to your service, is “boosts”. The equivalent for lemmy, would be cross-posts on communities you already follow, where the url field is either your local copy, or the federated link. Someone would x-post a link from another community, you’d see it, then subscribe to it.
A better answer to your question tho, would be a global community discovery service. Someone could either write one, and @nutomic@lemmy.ml has also written a lemmy-instance-crawler for join-lemmy.org to do the same. We could also potentially expand what join-lemmy.org shows, to list the most popular communities globally, and for each instance.
Since communities aren’t tagged, the only real way to look through them would be by popularity tho. But it would at least be a centralized place to see every known community on every known instance.
I’ve moved to all outlined material icons, and android has no outline arrow up or down: https://fonts.google.com/icons?icon.query=arrow+up&icon.platform=android&icon.set=Material+Icons&icon.style=Filled
I moved to the heart because its what masto and twitter were using, and it looked really good.
Boost for android has some good outlined arrow icons, but I couldn’t find where they were from as its a closed-source project.
The hearts come not only from other android apps like mastodon, but I also tried out a lot of things, and the hearts look the best.
I get that its weird, and if someone finds some good android-compliant up and down unfilled and filled arrows (they aren’t in the android material icon extended repo), I’ll consider it. But keep in mind that every tiny UI change is going to upset some people, and this app is still in alpha. When and if I switch back to arrows, people will have gotten used to the hearts, and complain again.
I’d thought we had another issue for this, but here’s one: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1026
IE making the community size affect the rank.
Its definitely limited, mainly in order to keep it small.
Another project I’d thought about, was essentially a semantic wiki of torrents, using their infohashes as keys, where people could contribute stuff like that openly to all existing torrents. And it could have semantic tags, so people could label the type of content, comment about it, add descriptions, etc. IE a TorrentWiki.
If you know what their instance is, you can do:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/announcements@lemmy.ml