This could be a concern but i think it will even out in the end. Many people will naturally gravitate to am instance that suites them. I created unilem.org as an instance aimed at not defederating. Some will like that and join others will not and find a different place that suits them. Its the beauty of the fediverse. You can choose your home or even host your own.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then just back up the other files in the volumes directory where Lemmy is installed (everything except postgres, which is what the database dump does).
The pictrs volume includes both the uploaded images and the image cache. I have no idea how to separate out the uploaded images so you don’t have to back up the cache, I just back it all up.
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.
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 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 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.
At the moment, just communities. I thought about letting people make accounts, and might still do it, but I don’t want the responsibility until I’m sure the system is reliable without much extra work. It seems like the lemmy.world people are running into a lot of problems.
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.
Right now the process for me finding a new community is find the community, go to the search page in my browser, type in the community, search for it, wait for it to show up, and sub to it, restart my app. That sucks.
Everyone here by now knows how to find a community. Getting to that community fucking sucks.
You left out the 20% or so chance the subscribe button just doesn’t work. Also the 30% chance you find a community with 1 active user and less than 5 posts total, none of which point to a functioning community with a slightly different name.
Never underestimate the importance of convenience and the lack of work most people will do in most circumstances— and I’m not even blaming those people. A third-party tool will never catch on the way a built-in, organic convenience will.
My bad if I made you think I took it as something negative, I just meant my comment to reinforce what you’re saying. Because you’re right, we’ll do it, normies won’t.
Hmm, would be great if there was a like a nice, accessible list of these things for new users - tools and the like - and a link to that list was available on the Sign-up screen, right across Lemmy…
Would certainly go some way to reducing the friction between starting and knowing what you’re doing.
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.
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