It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It’s such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I’m new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
I’m very curious how this type of platform might perform under mass adoption. If it started getting anywhere close to reddit level traffic I’m sceptical how well the more popular instances would scale, and how the people that can currently afford to run them would be able to afford the infrastructure needed to keep up with millions of users.
there will be updates to help with scaling, but also in general we should be trending to smaller home instances and working to integrate meta-community features IMO. Its generally easy and affordable to run a server for oneself and a couple thousand users. Its when you grow well beyond these scales that things become an issue.
There is not a ton of value to being on a large instance, esp as the federation code gets smoothed out.
Part of the problem will be how to make new users understand this, though. Lots of people will be coming from something like reddit where they’ll just want to sign up through a popular instance and likely won’t fully understand what that means.
More advanced users will understand this, but it’s not then I would be worried about.
Yeah I think that’s an important task for us users, communicating how we use the fediverse and which tools we find helpfull.
We also need to be making tools and filling lists, helping people discover and learn about the platform isn’t something we can leave upto a corporate advertising department, it’s upto us.
I was interested in hosting my own Lemmy server, but how would it work for getting a few thousand users?
Besides those issues though, it’s awesome to hear that normal people’s servers could support a few thousand users. I’m sure there’s a person interested in self-hosting among every few thousand people.
Apologies if this is a basic federation question. I considered hosting a matrix instance once, but then I heard it consumed a ton of hard drive space* as you join popular rooms. And I wasn’t sure how it would work if I shared it with some friends, they shared it with some friends, and so-on, and then someone did something bad.
*RE hard drive space, this won’t be a problem when I host something at home, but right now I’m just paying $10/year for a KVM server that I’m using to share hobby web projects with some friends. It has limited storage space.
Step 1 is to run an instance, step 2 is to engage across multiple instances using your instance account, step 3 partner with other servers, post on groups, basically advertise, step 4 SEO things.
Also, every chance I get i advocate for people to find smaller instances they like and not to overload whats popular or big as there is little advantage to it.
I expect growth to be similar to every other forum ive ever run, so far federation has made it a bit easier i think to get noticed.
Thanks for the response. I didn’t even think about having to advertise and SEO… I enjoy technical challenges, but having to self-promote is quite draining to me. It might be nice if there was some automatic way to recommend a new instance when new users are looking to create an account, even just based on capacity, but also based on common interests (e.g. people who live in <some region>, people interested in <some topic>, etc). It seems like join-lemmy.org tries to distribute new users somewhat, but it might be nice if it offered to narrow down the list for you based on some information you could choose to provide.
RE self hosting, I was more concerned about legal problems, like this post in [email protected]: "If I self host a Lemmy instance for just myself and maybe a few friends are there any risks?”. But more generally, if you let randoms make accounts on your instance, with the goal of taking some load off of the more popular instances.
TL;DR: I enjoy debugging technical issues for a few hours, but I have no interest in having to moderate heavily.
depends on where you are, if you are in the US you are still generally protected from prosecution (check your laws or talk to a lawyer). You do need to have a process for removing bad content (just deleting it) and be prepared to ban and purge content if you receive any legal notices.
also something to note, your server does not copy everything on the fediverse, just what users on your instance have subscribed to. Im looking forward to being able to block communities as an admin rather than simply defederating.
re: moderation load. I like topical servers, I run one around AI. I’ve always felt specific topic verticals are easier to moderate as its usually more expected to just shutdown anything not related to the core topic. You still deal with stuff from time to time but its never been a huge deal.
Running stuff here, my server is SFW so I have rarely seen anything terrible, I usually just ban and purge a user i see posting like that it only takes a couple seconds. If you are only subbing to safe, respectful communities its easy. If you want to walk lines, it can get hard.
What about your instance’s users? Are you responsible for what they post on other servers? Even if they aren’t posting anything illegal, but just spam? Or being very unpleasant? Is it likely that a popular instance could defederate from you if you have too many users like that? And what about someone making a bunch of bot accounts on your instance?
I’m perhaps a bit too paranoid, when I first got my own server and saw thousands of SSH login attempts in half an hour, and plenty of malicious HTTP requests in the apache logs… I’ve felt like it’s a jungle out there. I’ve since changed to a different port for SSH, and disabled password login (only SSH keys). Every now and then though, it seems like my non default port is discovered, and I need to change it again, or my logs will be filled with failed login attempts[1]. Perhaps I’m unlucky for renting a server in an IP space that often gets compromised… it’s just scary to me, since I’ve never even shared it with the general public (just a few friends).
[1]: I realize this isn’t a big deal, but I’d like to avoid it if I can. Perhaps I should investigate some software that automatically bans abusive IPs.
thats up to you, there are no laws against spam and as long as they are posting within the bounds of the law you have no issues. HOWEVER if your user is being annoying, breaking rules, or posting content that other instances don’t want to see it could get your server defederated.
really though, most of these are issuse if you want a big instance, if you keep it small and the rules clear, you are unlikely to deal with this and when you do it will usually be a matter of clicking Ban then Purge.
Thanks for all the info. Some day I’ll definitely give it a shot.
I’m bit of a noob on how this all works, but isn’t it possible to ddos instance to oblivion? As everything grows, there will be conflicts, bad actors, demand of sensorship and reactions to taken actions.
Right now we are a small village with communal spirit that hardly ever needs its sheriff.
Oh, for sure. And that’s on the instance owner to understand how to mitigate, and it’s not cheap to do for instances with large amounts of traffic.