Small meta update:
@ex_06@slrpnk.net transferred the ownership of the slrpnk.net domain to me today. I hope he will be still around as an admin, but as we are preparing to migrate this Lemmy instance to my server it is easier that I am also in control of the domain. There might be some outage while the domain is being transferred to my DNS registrar.
Sometimes before March 2023 we need to transfer the actual instance from the current hosting kindly provided by the Lemmy developers (the one year free offer). I hope to be able to provide an as good if not better hosting (also within the EU), but it remains to be seen how that works out. In case you are wondering: I am just some guy hosting various FOSS stuff privately, so no commercial entity or anything like that involved.
Given that this will be technically a transfer of personal data under the GDPR regulations (and Lemmy doesn't have any specific GDPR compliance tools) I would like to kindly ask people with a slrpnk.net account to object here in the comments if they do not agree to me taking over. In that case I will remove their account from the database once I transfer it to my server. Or even better: just delete your account in the coming weeks.
Once things are safely transferred I will probably look into enabling additional services. My initial plan is to make XMPP chat rooms and maybe linked accounts available under the same domain.
Oh and if you are an active member and are interested in becoming an slrpnk.net admin please send me a DM. No need to be a sysadmin, as moderation etc. also needs additional help.
For now there is no option or need to donate, but I might put up a small donation link in the future if there is a demand for it.
Small update as of today: The server is holding up fine and we went from less than 10 online users to quite consistently around 50 in the last 3 days. I am also getting around 10-20 new user applications per day.
I think the current server will easily be able to handle 10x as much and probably more, but I don't have much practical experience with hosting Lemmy so far and I would prefer a bit more organic growth to be honest.
It seems like most people expect this to be still the quiet before the storm, so lets see how it develops on Monday onwards.