The fanbase is still large, but the Lemmy community hasn’t quite caught up yet, and now there is a transitional period where the audience is smaller.
And the old memes trend is that time the band did a bunch of coffee shop shows playing nothing but ukuleles.
Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.
Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.
But all the other federated instances will have an duplicate of certain posts/comments, right?
Maybe some content in cache. Not photos for sure. I’m not sure how exactly will this look like, but we can observe vlemmy.net as example, as it seems to be permanently down.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
Maybe look into borg and https://www.borgbase.com/ - they give 10gb free. I sat it up for some important data I would want to keep if utter disaster struck yesterday, and was pretty straight forward.
You could also set up a more ghetto time machine like rsync with https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup if you have a machine on your network with ssh access from outside.
If you’re asking what the $6 gets, I’m talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn’t sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don’t know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.
It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name
My man, you are getting absolutely bent over a barrel by your registrar. You could get that domain significantly cheaper at a place like Porkbun or Namecheap.
I actually use namecheap. It’s only a few bucks first year, but .world domains cost $31.98 per year after that. So not $35 like I remembered, but pretty close. Or maybe that is the price with tax.
However, if I wanted a .nl domain, it’s only $7.98 per year. Looking at other domains, it’s crazy, but .inc is $2198 per year.
This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:
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Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
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Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
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It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation
I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.
just spread knowledge about tools like this https://lemmyverse.net/
just raise awareness about tools like this one https://lemmyverse.net/
Lemmy.ml is hosted by the maintainers and Lemmy.world is the biggest instance (because they were one of the few that didn’t restrict sign ups when Reddit API went dark) so those users are going to have the most communities.
Despite this I still am subbed to many communities on beehaw, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.it.just.works
And I have some subbed communities on smaller instances.
But I will say that I’m thinking of starting a new community but I’ll probably do it on Lemmy.world as they have the funds and manpower to guarantee uptime
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Unless there’s an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It’s also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
Unfortunately, Reddit and Twitter going shitty this year just reminded me that the Internet on the whole is only 30-some years old and things are still fleeting. I think it’s unreasonable to expect any one center of discussion or any particular service to be around forever.
Isnt text content stored by servers that are federated with those big instances so if they go down the content is still accessible?
So, matrix has the concept of aliases for channels/rooms. ActivityPub should do something similar for communities.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
Edit: Meant to reply to the person concerned about the centralization of communities.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
Please do it more often if you have users other than yourself. One backup on the same server is barely a backup at all.
Fair enough. I’ll look into automating it using some sort of storage from another provider.
Even just a cronjob or scheduled task to download the backups to a machine at another location would be a big improvement. Then you can do it far more often because it’s automated.
But personally I like to have both a copy on a PC and a cloud backup, in addition to the server.
I’m just over here waiting on more Braves fans to show up from /r/Braves. That’s where I was the most active.
The trouble is the fediverse means there can be multiple. I’m subscribed to two Red Sox groups but there’s only a couple dozen people in each one so there’s no real place for GDTs yet.
As more people join one will get selected. There was r/cars and r/autos for a long time. R/cars won out in the end.
Sports fans be like: If no NFL, Doritos, Mountain Dew, or gamble, me no want. Me sit watch game and eat Lay chip on couch. Reddit for smart people like me. Other sites no have football.
hey its like our own little MTV Unplugged session :D
