There are now two BifL communities in the free decentralized world:
Perhaps each wants to mention the other in the sidebar?
There’s actually two more, !buyitforlife@sh.itjust.works, and !buyitforlife@lemmy.world.
Unfortunately, the 3 other BIFL’s are no longer moderated. Their creators jumped in and created them during the reddit exodus (which is when I came here), and at some point left for whatever reason.
Due to their lack of moderation, I don’t feel comfortable linking to them. But also, I’ve come to the opinion that the fediverse is still small enough that I think it’s best to consolidate similar/exact communities where it makes sense to do so.
Sometimes it does make sense to have multiple, like if their instance would contribute a unique culture, or set of rules, or some other variation that would be lost if consolidated, so I think it’s best to approach consolidation on a case by case basis.
In the case of BIFL, all of them are going for the same goal, which is to find durable stuff. I guess the one here is slightly unique in that it encourages DIY solutions, but not to the exclusion of normal suggestions, so I don’t really see the benefit to having multiple, but that’s just my 2 cents. :)
I deliberately omitted those two. Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”. The
sh.itjust.worksandlemmy.worldnodes should not be promoted because they are centralized (by two factors) and antithetical to the purpose of the fedi.- factor 1: disproportionate size thus concentration of power by those admins over an unacceptably large population.
- factor 2: cloudflare, who currently decides who gets access to ~20—30% of all websites in the world. CF abuses their power and they marginalize several demographics of people (including poor people who live in regions where ISPs have to use CGNAT).
So I suggest not feeding those communities. It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.
It’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare’s breakage proliferates when CF’d nodes crosspost outside of their walled garden. E.g. if a CF-sourced image is crossposted to slrpnk.net, the image is inaccessible to me (and everyone else CF excludes) so I get a half missing post. Many people are here in the sufficiently decentralized portion of the fedi to escape abuses of concentrated power.
Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”
I wouldn’t have known what you mean by that without context.
factor 2: cloudflare
I wonder if they would be interested in alternatives to cloudflare. I’m assuming it’s the easiest one to deploy, but they may be open to alternatives if it isn’t too much trouble to switch.
More often than not, admins are interested in alternatives. When they hear there are no gratis alternatives, they shut down. CF is deceptively gratis. That is, the gratis plan is for relatively low consumption. When a service comes under attack which then leverages the defense admins signed up for, Cloudflare taps them on the shoulder and says: hey, you’re exceeding the bandwidth of the gratis plan… time to switch to premium. So the “free” evaporates.
Slightly more clever admins will use CF DNS and maintain their site in a non-proxied state (sparing their users from Cloudflare exclusion and over-sharing). Then when an attack hits they just have to flip a switch and CF is put into play. That switch can even be scripted to happen automatically.
Even more clever admins (e.g. infosec.pub) are very knowledgeable about how to do security properly without offloading their security problems onto everyone else.
Do you think the Infosec.pub admin would be willing to give some pointers to .World and .Works? That might be an interesting angle to persue.
I don’t really know the guy but I’m sure he is quite busy. He also runs infosec.exchange and a Threads-defederated variant of that, and an onion mirror, and fedia.io. fedia.io is on kbin/mbin and thus very buggy and he seems to put a lot of energy into chasing those bugs. IIRC he mentioned his bills are like $3k/month for one of or all of those nodes. Wouldn’t hurt to ask but the question should probably come direct from the interested admins. Maybe they could hire him.
You’re missing the main point, which is that they’re unmodded
Naah. Their points are very valid. Unmoderated communities are easily remedied by reaching out to admins. If they didn’t have their other points, I would suggest they just try taking over an existing community.
The question would be, why bother? If they’re unmodded and nobody’s putting in any effort with them, what’s to be gained by taking them over rather than just focusing on this one?