They all look the same to me, and I can communicate with other Lemmy users so what’s the point? (I don’t know anything about Lemmy lol I just joined)

    • CandleTiger@programming.dev
      0·
      1 year ago

      This is an excellent case in point — for most instances there kind of just, somebody felt like making an instance and here it is. If you don’t know anybody specifically there’s not much reason to pick one over another. Maybe in future somebody will start up commercial instances like email providers and charge extra to have better reliability or a cool name or whatever but so far the instances seem to be pretty much run for the sake of neighborly kindness and fun.

      Some instances have enough of a special interest that they get a distinct identity and reputation.

      If you go look at what’s posted/hosted locally on the hexbear instance you’ll see it’s got a shit-ton of general trolling, shit-disturbing, lib-pwning, and general 4chan activity. If that’s your jam, you can sign up there and have a “local” feed with that kind of content, concentrated.

      Meanwhile I’ve seen a number of calls to defederate from hexbear recently and if you sign up there you will not see or interact with whomever is posting from those instances who say no to trolling.

      • Aryuproudomenowdaddy [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        If you go look at what’s posted/hosted locally on the hexbear instance you’ll see it’s got a shit-ton of general trolling, shit-disturbing, lib-pwning, and general 4chan activity. If that’s your jam, you can sign up there and have a “local” feed with that kind of content, concentrated.

        4chan activity? I mostly post ska.

      • Frub@lemm.eeOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        Is there an opportunity for ad monetization as a commercial instance? Because so far I haven’t seen any

        • magnetosphere@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          I think (don’t quote me on this, because I’m not sure) that the license agreement for kbin/Lemmy instances specifically forbids advertising. Then again, maybe I’m remembering an incorrect remark that some doofus made. I don’t know.for sure.

          • w2qw@aussie.zone
            1·
            1 year ago

            It actually completely allows it as it is AGPL. The only condition is that you need to release the source code to any users of the service.

            In practice it’s hard to keep advertising working while allowing third party applications.

        • CandleTiger@programming.dev
          1·
          1 year ago

          I was talking about charging subscription fees for the instance login, not ads. I imagine if you wanted to fork lemmy and change it to inflict ads on your instance users you could do that, too.

          I’m not thinking it’s an awesome business proposition right now, but if the fediverse gets big enough that users are willing to pay for Enterprise Reliability™ then I could see it happening.

          It used to be that you could self-host your email server or use your cool friend’s server. But these days almost everybody uses commercial hosting. I see lemmy and mastodon going the same way if they grow enough.