if you check sites that track HN's rankings, it was ranked #1 for a while, then it suddenly dropped to #27 and continued declining
https://hnrankings.info/40481808/
> People can use those open source tools on the free level that doesn't require the higher level of use.
Fair enough.
> You're mad they're trying to make money.
I'm not mad they're trying to make money, I absolutely understand that. But again, why do they want $2.50/user from a 3rd party client, while keeping the revenue from their first party app unchanged?
The excuse for API changes was fairness (3rd party client using the API for free while making a profit isn't fair), but charging this much just shows that they don't want 3rd party clients to compete in the first place. Which is also fine, if only they admitted it.
Remember that not all 3rd party clients are/were developed for-profit, there are plenty which are open-source, have no monetization or ads, and are gonna be hit by this change too.
>This isn't about Reddit being greedy.
This is Reddit being greedy. They are asking $2.50 a user per month, while the revenue they make from someone using the first party reddit app on average is just $0.12 per month. [0]
Add this the restriction on NSFW content served from the API, and it's clear reddit is just straight up trying to kill 3rd party apps.
> Actually, these users are generally deadbeat users. They're good at providing upload and buffering accounts but that is it. They don't make your community any better, they're spread out over multiple communities.
You do have a point, I guess it boils down to the definition of a 'good user'.
Like you said, someone joining from an invite they bought is likely gonna be more active.
From the staff's POV the activity of an account is of secondary importance though, and the respect of golden rules is paramount. Tree-bans often end up banning users with high userclasses and (very) active accounts.
From my POV as a normal user, I like the tracker being active but I don't like the web of trust being broken. An invite-only club is good because everyone was invited by a trusted member; if you can just buy your way in it's different.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that at the end of the day your personal interests change depending on what position you're in (staff, normal user, etc.) and while you as an user may not mind people buying invites because of passive benefits, the tracker staff has different priorities and definitely does mind.
IPT is a fine tracker but because of their scummy behaviour [1] you are very unlikely to climb the tracker ladder from there. You can try following that_guy_iain's advice under for sure, but if you feel stuck go for RED 100% (regardless of your feelings about collecting music).
Remember that user invites carry the risk that if someone in your invite tree breaks a golden rule (trading/selling invites) you will be banned too. Always prefer official recruitement.
It's not really a problem because they don't want people joining the tracker in general. It's about accountability, exclusivity and the quality of the user base. Invites being for sale means any random person could join, hindering the exclusivity and likely the quality of the userbase (a good user is already in other trackers and could join with other means). And of course, it also means that the user who bought the invite is more likely to break the golden rules because them getting tree banned is of no concern to them.
From the staff's POV it is very much a problem and some trackers are famous to drop the hammer at the slightest violation of the golden rules.
It's all by design, invite selling/trading is a big problem in the tracker world and tracker staff often force people to use their home IP to register for this reason. By having your home IP they can easily ban all your accounts if you are caught breaking some golden rule.
The interview process is not bad, it's just particularly slow in the case of RED. Especially frustating for europeans because most volunteers are in an american timezone and so interviews often happen in the middle of the night (in Europe).
OPS has faster interviews but you want to join RED if you want to climb the tracker ladder, so passing through OPS basically just adds some delay.
Anyway, if you value your anonymity this much, maybe private trackers aren't for you.
The common advice is to start out on RED (Redacted) by doing the interview, and climbing the pyramid from there. Use official recruitement to join other trackers, and with some patience you'll eventually have
everything you need.
Really a shame, especially for torrent users. The other good alternatives are double the monthly price at 10$/month in the case of IVPN (if you want port forwarding that is) and ProtonVPN. Unless you want to commit for a year or two and pay all in advance, which is meh but the discount may be worth it.
I apologize, I tried to answer a broader question and somehow kinda missed the main point.
If you host your own Mastadon server, you can federate with everyone.
Other servers will only block you if you interact with the nazis, child porn, et cetera. If you keep the problematic content read-only then it's gonna be fine. You can hide the list of federated/blocked servers, so no one will know (unless of course, again, you re-tweet, like, or comment something from a specific server).
There is no weird thing allowing transitive blocks, but mind that there are block lists so if your server is inserted in one you will be blocked by a lot of servers at once.
Imagine allowing everyone to register an account on your email server. Now you have people maybe sending stuff to other email addresses on other email servers that's maybe 'problematic'. In the case of email it's not a big deal, but with the fediverse it's different.
Instances usually have at least a set of basic rules (e.g. no to nazism), and will block instances that don't also follow them because they don't want to see swastikas on their home feed.
In practice this basically means that while the fediverse is decentralized and all that cool stuff, it's made up of two main groups of instances ('free speech' ones and not 'free-speech') that don't wanna have anything to do with each other.
Self hosting an instance for yourself without blocking anything may work, but the second you open it to the public, questionable people are gonna join and retweet questionable stuff from other instances. If you don't take action you're gonna get blocked, and if you take action you're gonna have to eventually de-federate with these problematic instances yourself.
Of course Kickstarter as a company can do nearly whatever it wants and ban certain types of crowfunding campaigns, it's just sad to see this happening left and right in many fields.
At least in this case someone can just choose a different platform (and in fact Unstable diffusion has switched to some else); if you run a website and CloudFlare thinks your website is morally bad (likely because some people complained, otherwise there is no incentive to do anything), good luck defending yourself from DDoS attacks; if the Mastercard/VISA duopoly caves to public pressure and bans your organization you are basically done (even if what you're doing is completely legal).