Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

  • @ComplexLotusEnglish
    -1•1 year ago

    Since Lemmy instance are not backed by commercial interest, but rather by nice volunteers and donors that have money and time to spare, they will be heavily affected by economic downturns (we still can see commercial interests still affect users negatively tho with reddit). Here are my thoughts on the matter:

    • as far as I understand the owner of the domain: https://lemmy.world even has to pay for this fancy domain name in the DNS system … every month subscription service style
      • (and tbh I hate the Domain name system) why should I fund it with my own money?
      • if you hosted with an onion site over tor that expenditure would not exist, but how would users discover your site then? Let me know if you know something about this
    • in times of deflation (meaning money becomes worth more, spending some money on a self hosted lemmy instance becomes nonsensical)
    • tbh if I hosted a lemmy instance and the users of my instance posted high quality content in quantity I would use it to train my own LLM, that would at least create some economic incentive for me to host such a page … but managing spam and bots will be HARD

    That is why you should always back up your comments on your personal device, would be nice if lemmy had an automated way of doing this (I should look into this more)

    • @[email protected]English
      13•1 year ago

      The thing you’re overlooking is that for a lot of the people hosting small instances, this is a hobby.

      Speaking for myself, the cost of a domain is basically nothing, and adding Lemmy to my hosting setup was zero - I already have more ram, cpu, and disk space than I’d ever need for this instance.

      Financial incentives are not the only thing people care about, and until relatively recently weren’t the general default purpose of online social spaces.

      • claymediaEnglish
        0•1 year ago

        Ok, sure. But what if your instance became popular and started costing you hundreds per month? Or in a couple years and you lose interest, do you keep paying for it? What happens to all of the content that users created on your instance?

        • @[email protected]English
          8•1 year ago

          Well, I’m very explicitly not running it with the intent of it getting larger than maybe a couple dozen people I know who are interested. I’m not really interested in content moderation at any scale, let alone with random people I don’t know from the internet. (My most recent job was dealing with content & abuse for a large cloud provider, and I have zero interest in picking up shitpost babysitting if it’s avoidable.)

          I’m otherwise going with the Mastodon Server Covenant as the basic guidelines: I’ve got a trusted friend I’m going to add as a 2nd admin, doing backups nightly, and at least a 90 day notice if/when I decide to stop hosting this.

          I’d happily transfer the domain & data to anyone who wants to continue to admin it, or ask the community members what they want done.

          I’ll admit that makes WAY less sense if I wanted to run an instance with thousands of users, but that’s very much not the goal.