I think they're stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they've done their bit for a while, and that's if they're still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.
My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It's a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn't have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn't mean it's well configured or secure either.
I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.
Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.
The DB migration at the end of this upgrade is significant, I was surprised how long it took when I upgraded my instance. Lots of room for things to go wrong considering the size of their DB.
In practice UPC will probably have some kind of fair use policy buried in its terms of service - your best bet is to go through those terms and see what you find. Fair use typically means they will start throttling you beyond a certain point. Most ISPs keep this reasonably vague (e.g. if your usage is in excess of what they deem to be reasonable, but no actual data amounts defined).
Not all ISPs have a fair use policy though, and typically you're better off on large ISPs where your usage doesn't really stand out that much.
It's not a mass exodus. There was a sizeable influx of people from Reddit to Lemmy/kbin, sure, but that's measured in the (low) hundreds of thousands. Reddit has hundreds of millions of active users.
The reality is it's not even close to a mass exodus, not yet.
My experience:
As a basic phone, it mostly works. Everything else is pretty bad. The Pine phone is underpowered, the environments are not very well optimised and polished, basic browsing was almost unusable, things didn't work properly, I had to use the CLI to get around UI issues (which is very sucky on a phone), etc. Battery life is bad, the camera is a joke (if it works), the screen has dead pixels after less than a year, it's not a great picture.
I fully support what Pine phone is trying to do, in fact I bought 2 of them and I don't regret buying them, but know what you are getting into. It's nowhere near ready for mass adoption. If you're a hobbyist then it's a fun toy to play around with.
Purism is more expensive/better hardware and uses the Phosh graphical shell. I haven't tried it but I imagine the experience is a lot more polished. You could probably use that as a daily driver if you were happy to give up most of the apps / quality of life stuff your spyware phone currently does for you.
If you're not, then going the degoogled route is probably your best choice.
delendum @ delendum @lemdit.com Posts 3Comments 29Joined 2 yr. ago
I've tried refreshing lemmy.world and Cloudflare blocked me:
I'm officially a bot now I guess.
Edit: But more on the topic, they have been plagued by DDoS attacks recently so my guess is it's more of the same.
Edit edit: