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.
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.
This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:
-
Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
-
Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
-
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 raise awareness about tools like this one https://lemmyverse.net/
just spread knowledge about tools like this https://lemmyverse.net/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
So, matrix has the concept of aliases for channels/rooms. ActivityPub should do something similar for communities.
Isnt text content stored by servers that are federated with those big instances so if they go down the content is still accessible?
