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 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.
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.
