Is this really just the “backup site”? Boo, I say. Boooooo.
Also, wasn’t Reddit banning links to Lemmy or something? Maybe that was only in the run-up to the IPO?
Edit: elsewhere in this thread people are saying that trying to link to lemmy.world fails, and trying to link to lemmy.ml fails, but you can still link to other lemmy instances?
Worth noting that when Google was founded, Microsoft was in the middle of a long antitrust investigation, which was documenting every illegal thing they had done to maintain their monopoly and hurt every company that challenged it.
The “evil” in the Don’t Be Evil motto was widely seen as a reference to that company and that behaviour. From early on, Google saw Microsoft as a threat. They ran Linux servers, and tried to make sure as few employees as possible were running Microsoft on their desktops and laptops. A lot of internal tools were developed to try to avoid any kind of dependency on Microsoft, including ones that eventually became available externally like Google Docs etc.
Now, 25ish years later, it’s Google who are being investigated for leveraging their monopoly in a way that hurts consumers. IMO, they still never stooped as low as Microsoft did. Google paid Apple and Mozilla billions to be the default search engine. Microsoft used lawsuits and patents to try to drive their competition out of business. But, it’s still a monopoly that harms the world.
Anyhow, I’m glad that Google originally had the “Don’t be evil” motto, and also had this bit about AI principles that avoid the risk of harm. They act like useful warrant canaries because when they’re removed you know something’s up.
What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.
Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.
The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.
What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?
Especially important to understand decentralization when it comes to topics like piracy. Unlike Reddit, a non-commercial Lemmy instance isn’t going to be shut down by a CEO who is worried about how it might affect their ability to sell ads. But, admins can get threatened, they can get overwhelmed, they can get hit by a bus. It’s good to know how how to find other communities on other servers, etc.