PriorProject

@PriorProject@lemmy.world

Just an explorer in the threadiverse.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

PriorProject,

Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it's basically donations... either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.

But to put into context how much money we're talking about...

  • A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you're talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
  • The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That's not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn't take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.

Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course... those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.

PriorProject,

Lemmy.world (where OP's account is) has a rule 3 stating:

No posts or comments supporting or promoting QAnon related content or similarly disproven conspiracy theories. Moderators have sole discretion to decide if a post violates this rule. Birds are real. The Earth is round. Get over it.

See https://mastodon.world/about (both world servers are maintained by the same admin team, and lemmy.world links to that page for its rules).

Advantages to selfhosting a Lemmy instance?

So, as any self-respecting datahoarder and selfhoster, I have my server rack populated with a few machines, churning along as they tend to my hobby-related projects. Now that I’ve started using Lemmy I’m toying with the idea of selfhosting an instance, as I have both the hardware, bandwidth, and skillset for it....

PriorProject,

This isn’t a terrible idea, but it’s also important to understand single-user and tiny invite-only instances as analogous to “leechers” in the torrenting world. The federation load that an instance instance imposed on other instances depends much more on the number of communities it subscribes to than the number of active users. If a user stops using Lemmy but leaves their instance up, it’s generating federation load for no reason.

Tiny instances are inefficient, and while it is desirable for the network to be able to scale to the point where it can reasonably support lots of them anyway, right now federation queues are backed up and messages are frequently getting dropped. Encouraging lots MORE tiny instances is probably not the efficient thing right this second. Rather, we’d want more users joining mid-sized instances that are not overloaded locally and that are making efficient use of the federation load they generate by using it to serve 100-1000 users rather than 1 or 2.

PriorProject,

Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It’s not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you’re actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.

But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin’ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don’t read.

These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default… So you’re more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot’s docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you’re getting into.

PriorProject,

Liability is not binary. There is a qualitative change in risk as you transition from “I subscribed to 100 actively moderated communities that I read and am familiar with” toward “I subscribed to everything there is including the worst of the worst and I didn’t realize I was doing so and don’t look at the results”.

Also, moderation activities federate. So even if a rogue poster does “contaminate” the actively moderated communities on a well-admin’ed instance… when those mods and admins delete the offending material they’ll automatically cleanup your instance as well. As a result, it’s the creepy crawly communities that don’t clean up or don’t want to clean up that generate the lion’s share of risk.

Is it 100% safe to sub to well-moderated communities, no. You have to know your local laws and protect yourself. Do you do yourself favors by running lemmony? Also no. These two statements can be simultaneously true.

PriorProject, (edited )

The upsides are that you control your defederation list and you’re your own admin so you’re in control of whether your instance goes down and what it’s policies are.

The downsides are:

  • Potential privacy leaks. Your all feed is public. If its full of creepy shit and you’re the only person in your instance, it’s there cause you subscribe to creepy shit.
  • You’re in control of whether your instance stays up. Security vulnerability gets mass exploited? Your problem.
  • Potential hosting liability. Your instance mirrors what you sub and serves it to the public unauthenticated internet. If you subscribe of stuff that’s questionably legal in your jurisdiction, that liability can become yours unless you’re familiar enough with your laws to know how to protect yourself.
  • All the standard self-hosting stuff like cost and hassle.
PriorProject,

Do you realize that you’re advising OP to ignore a mod (in a reply to said mod) of this community who is being perfectly chill while informing OP about the published rule 3, which the community mods have stated they’re being relaxed about while so many new Lemmings are joining, but not giving up on forever?

Rule 3 is quoted below, and helpfully directs people to active communities that are dedicated to support:

Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, find help in the list of support alternatives below

PriorProject,

Lol, upvoted. Good luck to you Don Quixote, I can think of nothing that can go wrong with this plan whatsoever.

PriorProject,

I mean, the mods are being chill about it so far. If they start dropping bans, the users trying to turn this into a support community won’t actually be users anymore and they can go create asklemmyaboutsupportbutalsootherstuffwhatever and mod it themselves. In this respect, lemmy communities differ from language evolution.

For my part, I’m here for a discussion sub. I participate heavily in lemmy support communities, but that’s not why I joined here.

PriorProject,

The lemmy.world instance has its own voyager install at m.lemmy.world so you don’t have to enter your creds into a 3rd party proxy.

PriorProject,

Try these steps:

  1. Logout via Home -> Hamburger menu -> accounts are at the top, click there and sign out. Try signing in, did you win?
  2. If not, sign out again then long-press the app icon from your android launcher screen and select App Info, or find another way to get to the android settings screen for Jerboa and Clear Cache and Clear Storage. Try to log in again, did you win?
  3. If not, sign out again and sign back in. Did you win?
  4. If not, cry because I’m stumped. You could also try liftoff, which if you weren’t logged in prior to yesterday shouldn’t have a cached broken session. Or install the PWA from lemmy.world via Firefox mobile. Or use the brand new Voyager setup at m.lemmy.world again as a PWA via Firefox mobile. Of those, I like Jerboa and liftoff best.
PriorProject,

Yeah, fair. I feel like I recall them mentioning an auto-updater that they hadn’t yet set up but planned to.

Folks that want to get faster updates can certainly use the voyager Dev’s instance… it’s the source after all. For someone like me that doesn’t want to enter their credentials into a 3rd party proxy, I’ve been testing world install of voyager alongside Jerboa and Liftoff and it’s been a solid option.

PriorProject,

There’s a lot of factors to consider, enough factors that there’s no consensus on how you make this choice and at the end of the day you have to pick one and run with it.

A random list of some factors you could potentially consider before yolo’ing:

  • Is the admin team good? Are they power-tripping jerks? Are they ideologues who are likely to defederate the world for no sensible reason? Do they have a good head for policy? There’s no easy way to evaluate this, you have to look at the sidebar to see who the admins are, stalk their posts a bit, read the modlog for banned users (but he aware that moderation decisions are federated and anonymous so it can be hard to tell what mod did what), and you yourself have to be good enough at these things to recognize quality (or at least alignment with your own values).
  • Is the instance well-funded and is the admin team prepared to deal with the serious stuff like child-porn reports and subpoenas? Again, this is hard to check for. Basically, if an instance has been pretty big for years (there are only like 2 or 3 Lemmy instances like this and they’re all overloaded) or has the admin team run some other big service before?
  • Are the instance rules compatible with your topic? Don’t run a porn sub in an instance that bans porn. There are vibe concerns as well, like an edgelord meme community is not going to do well on a hyper-moderated safe-space-oriented instance.
  • Is the community topic geographically based? You might want to pick an instance homed in that geography. This can be eval’ed by using ip-lookup tools of the instance doesn’t advertise its geography.
  • Is the instance homed in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws for your topic? It’s better to host a community for sex-work or bourbon on an instance in a jurisdiction where those things are legal, rather than in the UAE.
  • Is there a topic instance that specializes in your topic? There’s a pathfinder TTRPG instance and a star trek instance, is there one for your topic? Note that topic-based instances can fail some other and more important criteria like being an experienced admin team. It’s possible that a topic instance is NOT the right choice, but it’s worth considering.
  • Is the server overloaded already? Mebbe pick a different one.
  • Is there already a well run community on another instance? Help that one grow, don’t splinter the community further.

There are many more factors to consider, and no one considers them all. Eventually you have to pick an instance that’s “good enough” and run with it. But those are some of the major factors one could consider if you’re willing to put in the non-trivial amount of effort required to evaluate them.

PriorProject,

The splintering is an issue I’ve run into already. When I searched for squaredcircle on the assumption the subreddit community had started moving, I got results for five ‘squaredcircle’ communities across five different instances and none of them have a significant membership.

Yeah, I blame Lemmy’s fairly terrible cross-instance community discovery and just being young. Reddit had overlapping communities as well (tons of DnD subreddits, tons of aiti subreddits, and there were plenty of high-profile community split events over mod policies). But because it was so well established in recent years… most communities had standardized on one well-run subreddit.

But Lemmy’s community search is so poor, I think folks legit fail to find bigger/better off-instance communities and so no single one gets a toe-hold to gain critical-mass… they all just kind of smoulder with catching fire. Hopefully better community discovery will come and the well-run communities start to rise to the top.

PriorProject,

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.

PriorProject,

If I had to guess, I’d say lemmy.ml is overloaded and to try again. I think I uploaded an image a few days ago via Jerboa but I’ve been testing different clients and it’s possible I used Liftoff which is another popular android client you could try to see if it behaves differently.

Also, this is the wrong sub for support questions. See rule 2 in the sidebar.

PriorProject,

This is the wrong community for this question, it's an open-ended discussion forum like AskReddit... not a support forum for Lemmy.

That said, check out the v18 API before you start writing a bot. It's going to change in a big way shortly.

PriorProject,

Rule 3, this is not a community for Lemmy support. There are Lemmy support and Lemmy admin communities, try asking there.

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