you must admit we don’t have the same rights here as we would in a society.
I’d disagree, and actually say that you have even more “rights”. You can move to another instance, or even start up your own. The equivalent (moving to a different country/city/town, or starting your own) is a bit harder to pull off depending on your situation.
The next major release will even have an account settings export/import feature to make this a bit easier. Or for now, you can use something like LASIM.
My favorite way of discovering new communities / instances on Lemmy is through Lemmyverse and it shows 1,378 instances at the time of my writing!
Just as a heads up, I noticed that your user avatar doesn’t seem to be loading properly, and going to it directly gives a The image https://.... cannot be displayed because it contains errors. message, which also occurs with your instance’s site logo as well. Pictrs might still be having some issues for you, or if you made any major configuration changes you may need to re-upload those images.
Do note that this doesn’t actually account for an accurate total of Lemmy instances across the Fediverse. It is a hardcoded list of instances.
Edit: Correction, its a generated list of instances (that gets copied into Jerboa) that have a MAU amount of more than 50 as pointed out below.
If you have Flatpak setup on Debian, Element can be found on and installed from Flathub!
The problem though is they don’t want you or I to use the API as a third party client - they want everyone using their first party app which is chock full of ads and I assume tracking as well. To them, that data is more valuable.
Otherwise they could charge a reasonable price for the API, like you mentioned whether at the user level or the developer level.
Your link seems to have an extra h in front of https, here’s a fixed copy of the link in case anyone is on mobile.
But this would be incredibly awesome to see! I hope more of the third party Reddit app devs consider the same thing as well.
In addition, I’d reckon that at least part of this is due to the fact that IRC is somewhat centralized - to my knowledge (I only lived at the very tail end of the “popularity” of IRC) you couldn’t really be on one server and chat in a room that was on another server, right? Technically the protocol did have the capability for multiple servers to communicate (such as what would occur with netsplits), but you didn’t usually add someone’s server to the network as far as I understand (unless that is just a trend I missed out on).
[The rest of this probably deserves to be its own parent comment, but I’ll leave it as a reply here since it is partially relevant to the topic of IRC in this thread]
I’d think that at least systems like Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy have some resilience to this since they are very interoperable by their nature, but it’ll still need a ton of work done in order to get there.
The biggest problem is not the technological aspect of these applications / The Fediverse, but the onboarding and “human element” to them. I operate my own Matrix, Mastodon, and now Lemmy instances but out of the three I feel like Matrix was the only one where I was able to “see the world” so to speak without any extra steps. With Mastodon I had to subscribe to a relay in order to receive posts from other instances, and for Lemmy… well I’m still working that one out and trying to figure out how it works (I see new posts to the communities I’m subscribed to, and will see that it says there are three comments as an example… but they’re not visible?) - so I just don’t see how others are going to be able to avoid joining massive instances since you don’t have those issues there (or at least, to the same degree).
Ah, that’s not likely to be found at any site really (that I know of at least). That model makes sense for governments, but for websites its not like you’re able to vote in a new site owner (well, strictly speaking from an independent run website and not one that’s run by a corporation cough Reddit - even then, you can’t really just vote out Reddit Inc as a whole).
But, America was founded because they didn’t want to be connected to a government they felt like they had no influence in, thus splitting off to form their own government - it’s very easy to do the same for Lemmy (you could even go as far as Hexbear did, and fork Lemmy and maintain your own version).
I’m not familiar with any websites that are run in the way that you’re referring to, but I’d be interested to see one and how it shapes up (even if I wouldn’t be interested in running one myself), though I’m not sure how the logistics of it would work. However, I’ve seen the idea come up a few times in the past before so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s one out there (or at least, in the past).
Personally I see the analogy is a a bit silly for a site that takes place in the Fediverse. If you break a law in most places, you get thrown in jail. On a Lemmy/Fediverse instance, if you break the rules you get banned - but can start a new account elsewhere and participate in the same communities (for better or for worse). This exact community isn’t even hosted on lemmy.world, so the definition of “site” in the Fediverse is a much less important abstraction than it would be if you were to say, be banned off of Reddit, hence why I keep circling back to moving instances/standing up your own.