Is this really true?

Twilio is the biggest sms back end and it’s like $10 per number month or something.

Australia also, South West corner. Water is fine to drink, I just don’t like the taste. We collect rain water instead - heaps of that.

The biggest problem I see is fragmentation, people are creating the same community in different instaces, /c/Piracy for example.

I agree, to an extent. You’re right in that if you were part of the vibrant community of /r/piracy then it’s miserable to see it shatter here on lemmy. That said, this only applies if you’re expecting lemmy to be a 1 for 1 reddit replacement. For this type of community to remain cohesive, /r/piracy would have had to spin up their own instance and in /r/piracy direct everyone to lemmy.piracyinstance.whatever.

You can’t really “fix” this in a central way because even if you did, it would be trivial to create an instance that would allow duplicate community names. Also, I can see a lot of use cases for lemmy which do not intend to be federated.

That said, it’s not necessarily as big a problem as it appears, if you just accept that this is how the fediverse works. There’s no single source of control, so of course people can create 147 different /c/piracy communities if they wish to. Once you accept that, then it’s not really that difficult to subscribe to all the /c/piracy communities you can find.

The problem itself could be diminished by a few new features which I feel certain will emerge in the future:

• linked communities, where one communities content is syndicated to another. So if you post in [email protected] then you also post in [email protected]. This would work differently to cross-posting, all comments would be reflected on both instances.
• grouped communities, where you can subscribe to a group of /c/selfhosted communities with one click, so you see them all in your feed.

Not really. It’s incredibly frustrating and I’ve def lost some faith in humanity.

I thought /r/selfhosted would be ready to jump but everyone is like “but there’s no users on lemmy” and “you’ll split the community” and “we’re going to go dark for two days - that will teach them!”

Consequently there’s been no support for any single refuge.

Additionally people have set up several communities here with similar names in the past but now mods aren’t responding so it’s all a bit of a mess.