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.
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?
- how would they discover it? I just picked a server that seemed popular, and I’m already wondering about defederation/etc. I don’t feel like I’d want to make more than a few different accounts, and I’d probably only actively use one or two, tops
- would I be responsible for moderating my users? What if they post spam/worse to other instances? What if they’re just nasty to others? I wouldn’t want my instance to be de-federated. (Though maybe as you get more users, more of them are willing to be moderators)
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 !selfhosted@lemmy.world: "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.
