We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team.
We have made attempts to contact the Rammy admins, which other instance admins have tried as well, to determine their current status. Due to their admins being absent and their unmoderated content growing in numbers, we will defederate from Rammy. If and when this situation changes, we will be happy to reevaluate our approach. It should be noted that any instances that have abandoned admin teams will be defederated.
how does that work - I mean, who’s paying the bills for the instance if it’s unmoderated? weird
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What’s that? It’s on somebody’s property. Someone is paying for power, connectivity, and air conditioning.
The host is on vacation and has no backup admin.
Damn, not sure if this is a joke or speculation, but imagine the shit storm they’re gonna come back to. I kinda feel bad for them if they didn’t intend for this to happen and the cleanup they’ll have to do, but at the same time, they kinda shoulda made sure they had a backup, or at least closed sign-ups while they were gone (assuming it wasn’t a medical emergency).
They could be in the hospital or anything if there’s only one.
Definitely a nightmare to come back if that’s the case.
Brings back bad memories of so much work on Ark being undone by griefers…
Speculation, I have no idea what they can up be to
I host my instance in my house on my old PC. I’m going to pay my power bill either way. It actually autopays. So if I had a medical emergency and couldn’t do my admin duties, my instance would keep on going for a very long time.
I don’t have any users on my instance other than me, so I don’t need to worry about this specific thing. But paying the miniscule amount of power that my server consumes would be trivial.
What’s the benefit of running your own instance?
As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive…
Honestly, nothing.
The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn’t going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.
I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.
With that said,
Basically everything else is downsides.
Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.
PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren’t uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.
Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @[email protected] doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn’t constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)
And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don’t really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.
There isn’t an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances… through lemmy itself.
On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.
Here are the incoming stats, from my “small” instance.
In terms of outgoing, it’s very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.
tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.
Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.
Thanks for your insight, that was really cool to read about
good comment, appreciate the insights. This actually shows how much more work has to be done to let Lemmy scale safely…
There are third party solutions which helps a bit.
For example, Lemmy-helper from RocketDerp. https://github.com/RocketDerp/lemmy_helper
But, I’d imagine with this recent growth, its only a matter of time before better administration and moderation tools start appearing in the native GUI.
As someone who has done similar things professionally, I am not envious.
Is /c/bestof a thing yet?
I am sure it exists somewhere. If not, you can always make it!
it is, but having wierd issues posting permalinks, not sure why
I don’t need to worry about the instance going down due to attacks, because no one is going to spend their time attacking an instance with one person. They want to attack an instance with everyone.
I also don’t need to worry about defederation drama. If I’m not subscribed to any communities on those problem instances, I don’t even see the problem, and my server doesn’t rehost those problems. I was originally on lemmy.world, and then Beehaw defederate with lemmy.world. But I wanted to see Beehaw’s content. Now I can see both. No one is going to defederate with me because no one on my instance (literally just me) is doing anything that would get us defederated.
I also don’t need to wait for my instance to update to get new features. I literally just update my instance as soon it gets posted to Docker Hub.
I also just find it fun to host my own! I already had my domain name and wasn’t using it for anything. I already had a server ready to go. So why not?
You may still get content from problem posters from those instances coming via other instances that have federated with them. I make some tools for small Lemmy instances, and while I haven’t posted this one yet, Lemmy Defederation Sync might be a good one for you: https://github.com/fmstrat/lds. LCS and LPP are there, too.
I guess I worry about when it happens. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, so I see no point in doing anything about it.
In my case, the major upside is that I make federation choices, not someone else. I prefer to be as openly federated as possible.
Hi bilb, this is blab. I just wanted to say thank you for your approach. You run a wonderful server.
I appreciate that. Always great to hear from you, blab!
Somebody might be getting a nasty AWS bill at the end of the month.
Mmm weeks, delicious
Huh, don’t know what that was about. Edited.
Ok but it could be a raspberry pi chilling in someone’s house using utilities they already pay for anyway.
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I imagine a lot of people have jobs where it would be trivial to set something like this up on company resources under the radar and then lose access / get laid off without the company ever knowing it’s running
This is pretty unlikely. Any competent IT department would notice an externally facing project.
I think its more likely that its on a vps or something and they just paid for like a year upfront.
No. It’s very likely. Not every company is run like a FAANG company with everything under a microscope. At your average company, it’s extremely common for individual teams to just have their own cloud service accounts for internal team use, not as tightly controlled as a company’s production cloud services account. I’d argue most of them are very loosely managed by a single person, letting said person do pretty much whatever they want.
And if those accounts have thousands of dollars in AWS credit or something, this could run under the radar for up to 6 months uninterrupted, depending on when the credits expire. Most credits are handed out for free from the cloud service provider with no cost auditing or anything of the like.
I’m in a position where I could do this myself at work with very low risk of getting caught. I just have no interest in doing so, and I’d rather not be fired if I did get caught. But it’s definitely possible.
At mine, we get our own personal public dev sites which can host whatever code & software we like, alongside the products we develop and their APIs.
Totally possible to set up a lemmy instance and nobody would know, but not worth losing a job over at all if caught.
Possible does not equate to likely. Its a pretty ridiculous scenario to assume when its much more reasonable to suspect that its just being hosted on a stable system and paid in advanced.
I wouldn’t say it’s a ridiculous scenario, just less likely than a proper self-hosted instance. There are plenty of companies that don’t have a microscope on everything, still not a good reason to use their resources for something like lemmy instances
That didn’t answer the question at all lol
I think they mean it’s just running on someone’s homelab. So there is no real monthly billing.
Edit: so the IP belongs to contabo.com hosting. They provide cheap vps instances with 4 cores, 8gb ram, 50gb nvme and 32tb of monthly traffic which is plenty to start hosting a Lemmy instance. Could be they paid for a year and went on holiday or something like that. Who knows
That’s… not how bills work. Someone has to pay for the electricity, internet traffic / connectivity, and rent / mortgage for the server to exist somewhere. That’s true whether it’s self-hosted in someone’s basement or in a data center somewhere.
You technically aren’t wrong.
But, in my case, I already had all of the capacity paid for regardless. I’d say, lemmy runs me around 20-30w of load total.
30w * 24 hours * 30 days = 21,600Wh / 1,000 = 21Kwh * 0.08c = 1.68$ per month.
In reality, the power load is quite a bit less, and my calculations don’t account for the solar panels on my roof.
Given, I have around 140-160T of total storage capacity, its not really worth putting a price on the small amount used by lemmy. My internet is paid regardless, and lemmy usage is typically pretty low (typically measured in Kb/s). So, not really worth putting a price here, as it averages less then 1% of my total connection.
If, I wanted to put a price tag on it, my labor to actually support and maintain it, would be where all of the money went to.
Contabo’s sign up page lets you pay for up to 12 months at a time, in advance. It’s quite possible they paid for a year, set it up, and then forgot about it or haven’t been able to administer it for other reasons.
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I’m still trying to understand what he means with the rent or mortgage thing… Of course there is a cost but he doesn’t seem to understand how something like that easily stays under the radar… you are not going to notice it when a certain bill goes up for the little bit it costs to self host or what impact it will have on your mortgage… There are things like data usage that will be easier and clearer indicators
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As if everyone running a home server has proper monitoring. You think running an instance is going to make a noticeable difference on your electric bill? Mortgage for the server?
I checked the IP and it’s hosted on contabo.com
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Yeah, could also have paid for a year upfront
Maybe it’s not actually abandoned. Just providing plausible deniability that way.
It’s running an older version of Lemmy, so it’s not being updated.
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Rammy is running 0.18.0 which still has the bloated postgres database issue, so storage should be ramping up real fast. It is still technically possible to forget about it, don’t get me wrong. I was merely pointing out it is not the only possibility.
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I think that in order to run Lemmy you’d need at least a PlayStation.
Nah mate, PS2 at minimum, and only with a fresh memory card
No worries, I took no offense.
Technically yes one could, absolutely. No disputing that. Automatic defederation is not a thing afaik, so it would stay federated.
I run a script daily on my instance to defederate suspicious instances (no post but thousands of users for example) but not everybody does.
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Yes, but lemmy isn’t the most stable of software, so unless you set up stuff like automatic database maintenance and restarting lemmy if it becomes unresponsive, it’ll crash pretty quickly.
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It’s not necessarily super expensive for someone who wants to host an instance, whether it’s at home or via server providers. Hosting a GOOD and high-traffic instance might cost more but still any nerd with disposable income can do it if they want.