Reddit used to be open source too the problem with centralized software like that is that even if you start up your own instance (and lots of people did) it's completely empty and it's going to STAY completely empty forever unless you also get users posting things, which they're not going to do because you're empty.

The idea of Fediverse is that you can break down that impossible barrier to entry by communicating with all the other sites in the Fediverse even as a brand new site. Even though when you start your Fediverse server it starts out empty, it can pick up all the content from every other Fediverse site in the world (gradually) and get you past that initial roadblock, treating you as a potentially valuable partner and not a competitor. And if a big site goes away, their content is still with you, and everyone else.

It's not going to magically get you users, but maybe you don't want users, and all you want is the content. Or maybe it will buy you enough time to get the users you want to get. No matter what, while it's not a magic wand and building an active community is always going to be hard, it's certainly a step above Reddit's retracted "open source" offering in the way that it tries to encourage and support people to start their own communities. It's more than just throwing some software at them and saying good luck, it's also giving you content, and communication, and hopefully eventually even more as it grows and matures into the future.

I am really eager to see what kind of content discovery / search / recommendations people can start building on top of Fediverse and ActivityPub, I think that's the next step. Reddit's search and community discovery has always sucked, and Youtube's recommendation algorithm has always been untrustworthy, and I think things like that tells us it's probably a hard problem, but I look forward to seeing what the platform can do.

Same here ... I've been involved in lots of construction, renovations and building over my lifetime .. my family owned a construction business so I know a little of everything - plumbing, electrical, construction, woodworking, structure, concrete, HVAC, roofing, landscaping, heavy equipment and all sorts of other things construction related

Yes, I'm like you ... I love what I do and I enjoy helping people out with big or small projects when I feel like it ... but often there comes a time when the work is so big, so time consuming and costs me money that it makes one wonder why I should do the work ... it also makes me wonder sometimes if people are just taking advantage of me.

I love doing stuff for people ... but I also appreciate it when people give something back for the free work you offered them ... especially when there was a lot of work or energy or skill involved.

The work you do may not seem like much ... but to have the skill, knowledge, education and training that you have in order to complete complex technical tasks is worth a lot of money ... especially for us who don't have that knowledge ... never sell your abilities short. It may seem like nothing to you but it is a world of difference that many of us can not cross.

I understand how feel because I feel the same when I help out others too ... but I also believe that we should foster and build a culture of encouraging everyone to contribute a little bit of money everywhere to experts and knowledgeable people like you, to owners of instances, to developers of open source software and to those advocating for all of this ... if we don't, we will always run the risk of all this activity and all these projects becoming lost either by burning out all this volunteerism or creating situations where owners become so desperate for money that they see no other option than to sell their work and their efforts to the highest bidder.