They copy Trump.

Facebook, Google - all of GAFAM is built on Open Source. GAFAM ist clever.

A knife in the back of small and medium enterprises that offer hosting services. They cannot comply with this. The EU fosters GAFAM.

Mail was decentralized. Then came Gmail. Code alone ist not the solution. We need cooperative operations.

Learn Argentine Tango.

I can’t subscribe to https://lemido.freakspot.net/c/noticias

I think the biggest advantage is also the biggest showstopper as people have to learn, that Briar does not always delivers messages in at once in some milliseconds. As the article says the messages are delivered to the next Briar node and stored until in can be handed forward. Even with internet access delivery can last several minutes. And I don’t know how well Briars works if only few people use it.

We, a hosting cooperative in Germany, mentioned Lemmy in a book about free software that we published two weeks before. It is in German and targets clubs, non-profits, foundations and cooperatives. It’s free to download. https://www.hostsharing.net/publikationen/vereinshandbuch/

I really like your idea of promoting Lemmy by providing a limited free hosting offer. It gives people the chance to find sustainable funding.

In the book mentioned above we recommended Lemmy as a forum solution. Many organisations like clubs are looking for something like discourse or flarum to replace a mailing list for discussions or a community help desk. If an organisation uses Lemmy for inhouse needs giving accounts to all members the instance is funded by the organisation – and thanks to federation the users can join communities elsewhere too.

This is the organisational approach to sustainable Lemmy instances.

If there is no organisation that pays the bills, I have to look for funding elsewhere, as users won’t pay. I have to pass the hat around. But this is not sustainable at all.

Or I could go the usual internet way using ads to fund the instance. Is there a function in Lemmy that could be used as an advertising tool? A broadcast message by the administrator that is published to all accounts. Can instance administrators pin messages in communities? Or can administrators promote messages so that they get higher ranks?

I think of a Lemmy instance for a hobby targeting a community of consumers and producers where the producers are willing to pay for advertised postings.

hostsharing.net is the only hosting coop in Germany. But the website is German only, sorry.

Book a vm in a cooperative where you control the board as a member of the cooperative. In Germany there is Hostsharing, a cooperative founded in 2000 dedicated to green hosting, open source, privacy and security.

I would recommend https://cryptpad.fr/. All files are encrypted locally. You don’t need a database.

Not about cooperatives but maybe about the way to run them: I would recommend the book “We the people” about sociocracy.

Buck, John Jr, and Sharon Villines. We the People. Washington, DC: Sociocracy.Info Press, 2007.

The main problem there was that the employees weren’t taken along enough.

Somewhere I heard that the project was suffocated by bureaucracy, whether intentionally or not I don’t know. But I can imagine that the lobbying of Microsoft supported bureaucratic behaviour. I wish them all the best, but the history of governmental IT projects is a story of failure.

Every IT project of German authorities failed in the last two decades. So this is a bad news because the project will fail too and they will say it was because Open Source does not work.

You forgot to mention that you need a docker environment with ansible installed.

You can also use Briar.

I would appreciate a straight forward installation documentation for non docker installs as I am eager to install Lemmy on a managed server.

I always look at the instructions to install software from scratch. ;-)

Many organisations want to create a discussion forum for their members. This can be done with Lemmy as it is a forum with federation as add on. They can use local communites for their internal discussions and federated for for discussing things with the whole world. This is much better than having a forum only for members and only for internal use. The Glasgow instances shows what I mean.

Is it possible to restrict account on an instance to members of an organization eg. by using LDAP or invite only registration?

I am very new to lemmy (joined lemmy.ml only yesterday) so my knowledge about the software and its community is very limited. I am member of a cooperative that runs a Mastodon instance. Some of our members are clubs which might need a discussion forum for their hobby horse. Installing a forum like discourse or flarum is quite easy – running Lemmy needs a lot more. I would think that it requires as much maintenance like Mastodon or Matrix. So we need good arguments to promote Lemmy.

I think a good way to promote Lemmy would be to outline the benefit of running an instance for the maintaining entity – be it a club, a political party or group, a company, a town or region, a school or any other institution. I think a small list of usecases and benefits for a couple of organisations could be a good start. Maybe we can start here?