grey_earthling

And Mindustry (which is free on Flathub).

For users who've already installed Element on Android (or iOS), will there be an automatic upgrade/migration path to Element X?

Or do I have to persuade them to install an app again? And if so, how often will these manual migrations happen in future?

> Every other option results in far less people discovering and interacting with your project, by orders of magnitude.

Yes, this is the problem. The article suggests: try to fix it.

Until they run out. We can't recycle anything 100%. Eventually we'll have to learn to do without.

Patreon knows that Patreon doesn't work - they don't fund themselves by donations on Patreon; instead they take a cut of other people's donations.

And the model where some patrons receive a reward encourages transactionalism and disappointed patrons when they don't get the reward they expected.

Liberapay's model seems much more sustainable - donations only, no rewards; Liberapay fund themselves via Liberapay because they actually believe their system works.

Energy isn't the hard problem; it's materials. We're still consuming materials that we can't (yet?) make without fossil input.

> The Authenticated Transfer Protocol, aka atproto, is a federated protocol for large-scale distributed social applications.

Well, there's the problem: large-scale and social are incompatible. Humans evolved to be sociable with maybe a few hundred people.

No-one has ever made a good restaurant by inventing a system to deliver millions of calories per second to each diner.

What I mean is: where is the website other than bsky.app where I can see content from the network?

I haven't followed the tech of Bluesky or the AT Protocol closely: does this step mean that people can now set up their own Bluesky instances? Where can I see one in the wild?

> Beyond that: it's literal word of mouth.

This is the key.

If you have enough enthusiastic, loyal, (rich and/or generous) devotees, then you can make a living from their donations (e.g. Liberapay) or subscriptions (e.g. Patreon). If you're doing something worthwhile or even just fun, you've probably got some.

But if you don't — and this going to sound harsh about a labour of love — then evidently other people aren't (yet!) willing to pay you to focus solely on it. Maybe there's enough to cover some or all of the costs, or even make a surplus (but not a living), and you can carry on as a hobby/part-time/side-project.

But for the thing to continue existing, someone (maybe you!) has to care about it enough to pay for it, and Google certainly doesn't. Google doesn't know anything about the unique service you provide; it only knows about the words on your website, and it can get those same words ten-a-penny from other websites.

If Google's killing your site now, that means Google's been keeping it on life support since… whatever your previous strategy was. They're selfish money-getters, they never promised you page views or ad revenue, and you're not useful to them any more.