Update: I contacted with current big owners, other older friends and lastly from some friends from here. Mostly all of them living in US so they don’t want/can’t host it. So I’ll keep hosting without being on moderation side. @gavi@lemmynsfw.com will post about details I guess. @gavi@lemmynsfw.com is the new top admin.
As you know, it has been 2 weeks since I opened the instance and it has grown quite a lot. Likewise, the time I have to devote to this work has increased a lot.
I'm dealing with lemmynsfw more than my IRL job right now :D This is bothering me. Also, having an NSFW instance instead of a normal instance makes things much more difficult. If you remember; I had my biggest scale fuck up with the post "we allow loli content" :) This situation wore me out. Also a lot of problems are bothering me, both as a software and as a community.
That's why I'm thinking of transferring the instance and the domain to a person I trust. Who can maintain the deployments and also know this stuff. I will also roll over any donations made, excluding the current month's expenses.
I'm sorry if I've upset anyone. That's all from me.
@clopulous@lemmynsfw.com @Limeey@lemmynsfw.com @SecretLemmyUser_@lemmynsfw.com @paddedperson@lemmynsfw.com @___@lemmynsfw.com
Friends, I sent an offer to some knowledgeable people, but they said they could not do it. Understandable for sure. Is there anyone among you who has the knowledge to make the migration to their own server without me?
I would be able to,i would need information on what it is currently hosted on and access info, but i should otherwise be able to transfer it without issue.
Im a software engineer with a very stable job with flexible hours, and ive been looking for a long term project to get into. if it were transferred to me i could ensure a stable long term home for it. Edit:changing to=>for
I do sysadmin and software dev I can help where needed but I cannot provide hosting. Are you sure you’re willing to take on the responsibilities of moderating against illegal content?
I don’t know the tools available through Lemmy but we need strong controls again CP, rape, etc with effective logging and fast response times to takedown requests.
Yes I'm sure and i know that's going to be difficult. Illegal content needs to be prevented on the site. Currently my understandings are that the tools available through Lemmy are slim, and much will start out as a manual process, and pressuring/ ensuring mods are active in patrolling their own communities to the greatest degree possible. However I understand that the buck would stop with me, not with the mods at the end of the day. Shit rolls uphill and if communities are unsafe that would be a failure on whoever hosts this for not providing support to mods, or for allowing unsafe communities to propagate.
I also understand that realistically its going to be a job where you get alot of hate for just about all your decisions :/
This is true, but I assume also that the timing and procedures depend mainly on where the server is hosted. So it is very important to choose a place where the legislation allows some freedom. For example, I am in Italy and, if it is hosted it directly here, the law is not very restrictive regarding what pornographic material can be possessed, obviously although one does not knowingly possess child pornography, which therefore should obviously be eliminated as soon as possible. The gore, on the other hand, cannot be held and it would therefore be necessary to use a host in another country.
I am in canada, which has no laws preventing the hosting of gore content, They do (obviously) require we prevent CP both real and animated.
And what hosting were you thinking about to keep everything up?
It would take me a bit to do more thorough research on what is currently being used, and the issues that people have run into there. But i would be looking at primarily AWS, or Azure. Are you guys self hosting or using a hosting provider already ? Also depending on the current network traffic expectations its possible it could be self hosted (although again this would highly depend on what the current situation is and is very unlikely)
I personally have experience mostly with selfhosting and AWS which is what I would probably use. From what yay currently said the server is now hosted thanks to Hetzner.
honestly i had never looked at Hetzner before, and wow looking through its pricing its quite attractive (expecially in regards to network traffic) theres a very good chance i would stick with hetzner.
On hetzer I have some doubts I was throwing an eye at https://www.hetzner.com/legal/terms-and-conditions and it seems that they do not allow the possession of pornographic material, although it seems that now yay do it without problems I wanted to avoid the risk and I advise you to do the same
Yaeh, we would definitly need to migrate then. just becouse they havnet enforced it yet doesnt mean they wont. We could also look at alibaba cloud, which is what reddit uses currently. although then we would have to deal with that whole mess
I'd never looked at it, but glancing at it, however, it seems that having a reasonable amount of storage (considering the material we would be dealing with, I assume we need a lot ) the cost goes up. At this point perhaps it is better to self-host everything, the only problem would be to be able to have enough bandwidth
if i were to self host it i have access to a 2.5 up and down link, and i already have experience setting up self hosted content This would limit scalability in the future ( although to what degree is questionable)
Yes, actually 2.5 is not much and even if it would be sufficient for the moment, perhaps not anymore in the future. If we go this route there would also be a fairly significant hardware investment to be made.
Given the extend of this project, I think it might worth coordinating together those who are interested right now if possible so we can have more than one person who can tend to the backend and coordinate hosting. Might even be best to have people from different time zones just for increased response time. Just a thought!
Definitely. I think regardless of who the torch passes to, there will be a need to work with others to do this. there arent easy anwsers to many of these questions.
There is no way in hell a single person will be able to handle an instance of this size (and rapidly growing). Coordinating is a must if this instance (or any other like it should it die before everything gets set up properly) were to stay alive
That can be a good idea
I made a matrix group room to try and corral and at least attempt to figure this out together. Check DMs.
My bigger concern with self hosted solutions is that it gives us a single point of failure for things like natural disasters/power.
the 2.5 gigabit should be enough for now, I think hetzner caps out at 10 gig uplinks, and assuming they didnt upgrade from their standard dedicated machines, they would have a 2 gig uplink now
This is true, but honestly, I'm not familiar with the policies of various hosting sites regarding the provision of backups or fallback servers in different infrastructures, perhaps in a different location.
Self-hosting, in my opinion, could provide greater privacy and security to users rather than using external servers. However, it would also depend on the policies of the administrator and how website logs and data are stored.
There could be a few trusted folk out there turning their servers into S3 nodes (?) via minio or something like that, which Lemmy's pict-rs could use as storage. The main Lemmy backend process serves out the images anyway (I have no real idea why pict-rs is that separate tbh), so throwing a CDN in front of that (filtered to images and video) should be enough to get some reliability on serving images.
Of course this is only the technical stuff. The legal parts are a completely different issue altogether
The ui version in the footer says "UI: 0.18.0-nsfwpatch" - i assume there is a nsfw server patch too. Have you found those repos? We should check the code in there and make sure content is handled appropriately
I beleive the repos are under LemmyNsfw's git page https://git.lemmynsfw.com/lemmynsfw
Ok so I don't actually see any major change to the codebase there that helps protect the instance owner. The js patch doesn't seem to be working right, I don't see those blur/autoload controls in my sidebar on desktop. And to the server the only commit is apparently to "show nsfw by default".
I think you would be wise to consider more patching to handle things like auto-purge on certain reports, ensure that deleted content is actually deleted from the server, etc. I haven't reviewed the full lemmy codebase but I'm not convinced it's going to be enough to keep things on the up-and-up in an instance like this.
The JS patch was deployed for a very short time (remember when the NSFW box was showing checked but wasn't? Yeah). Any further development seems to have been done on the Lemmy code itself, under different tags (not branches)
Lol I don't think I was here yet for that, but that makes sense. The other part of the patch was lazy loading content which I think was merged into the core codebase? So it makes sense that most of that was eliminated.
Still, I was hoping to see more adjustments that would pertain specifically to keeping content moderation easier given the inherent difficulty this instance faces
I was wondering about the "ensuring content is actually deleted" bit, as right now theres a bug causing deleted posts to show for people. That definitly will need to be resolved in terms of auto purging, we would have to look into it, but i would prefer an alternative solution or a higher bar than just certain types of reports ( like suspending the content until reviewed, or autopurging only on a higher number of reports) that way someone cant just take down comunities by reporting everything.
I expect we'll need to patch our own tools, the nsfw angle is very specific that the core lemmy devs probably don't want to deal with. Let me know how I can assist and where
Thank you for outlining precisely why I don't want the job. Much respect to anyone knowingly willing to take all that on. No respect lost to anyone who admits that it's too much for them to handle.
It's funny; I've made a couple suggestions that the admin team liked, and some of the other responses seemed to think I myself was part of the team. One said they knew it was my server to run as I saw fit ("but..."), and another asked if I was going to kill their c/. Uh, no to both of those, actually. I'm just some dude.