this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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As a Reddit refugee with some questions! (self.meta)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by CelebrationMassive87 to c/meta
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As a former Redditor looking for a new home - I was first directed to Lemmy.ml - which has a stickied post asking users to find another instance to join. I was directed by an r/solarpunk moderator to this instance (makes perfect sense!) and had also seen suggestions in similar spaces to make a kbin.pub instance for myself.. somewhere in there I was thrown the idea to join Mastadon as well.

As I’ve come to understand, these all exist within Fediverse, and wherever I join I’ll be able to see and post and comment to the content of other Fediverse alt instances (although I haven’t really tried, I still don’t quite follow this - although I’m going to read up on this reply https://slrpnk.net/comment/133314 and search around myself too) - so no reason to get to caught up on where to sign it would seem.

This preface is actually somewhat a question itself (as I still don’t fully ‘get it’) and to maybe give people who have the same questions a space to ask away… at the same time it might help to contextualize my newcomer questions:

Questions on the Community

  • Are you comfortable with the Reddit refugees joining here? Is there any qualms or worries you (or anyone else, for that matter) has about this instance and an influx of users?
  • A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/133084 Be a good people here and on all of Fediverse. Join here if interested in the communities on this server

Platform/Interface Questions

  • I don’t know if this will work, @poVoq@slrpnk.net (doesn’t look like it worked) how can we @ a user?
  • A: Unknown to me, OP!
  • Are you able to sticky threads? If so, is that an admin only ability or is it possible for moderators within (or without, even) the communities too?
  • A: Unknown to OP

Questions about Subbing/Moderation

  • Is there a way to [un]subscribe, show or hide certain communities within this instance? And is there a way to track how many users are “subbed” to these communities?
  • A: Yes, if you go to a community you have the option to sub - this applies to the main pages “Subscribed” content and is the main way to see content within the beta [iOS] app. I believe there are ways to subscribe to communities in other Fediverse instances but I don’t know the easiest or most efficient way to do that yet, will update if I figure it out.
  • only way I’ve found how to subscribe to other instances is through the iOS app
  • Can certain communities be labeled as essentially “not currently active” and/or “pending moderation?” And can we see who are the moderators of any community?
  • A: I, OP, don’t know about the first part yet. But you can see who moderates each sub when you go to the sub - it has its own sidebar too
  • I would assume that the influx of expats from Reddit would be overwhelming for just the admin to ultimately manage. Is that the case? *Do moderators help?
  • A: Unknown to me the OP

Questions on Admin and Server

  • Do I have it correct that you are the sole admin? If so, thanks! And are you looking for help in the longterm or shortterm even?
  • A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/133500 on history of the server and admin.. unsure about if future help needed
  • Can there be multiple independent servers ‘hosting’ SLRPNK? Can different admins with different servers provide support (or “host”) for this instance? Would there necessarily always be a head admin? A: Unknown to me, OP
  • Is there a cap to how many users can join an instance/this instance?
  • A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/134156 nowhere near the cap, ideas for if it were reached include pausing new users or (if donations are provided) hosting on a bigger server
  • With the authority of having your own server (seemingly) and having a sole admin, is there anything we should note in terms of how this instance is hosted such as, under any circumstances if it were shut down? As kind of a floor-level question, what happens if the server goes down? Does the instance get wiped? Is it basically unusable but still archived?
  • A: Unknown to OP

I hope my questions weren’t too much!

Edit: Will add in questions post-OP noted with an *. Putting in answers (both for other users and for myself to tinker with formatting and organizational structure) any missed answers may in full be due to this OP’s lack of reading comprehension.

Also these questions aren’t just for the Admin so if anyone of you know anything that would help please leave a comment and edumacate me. Also for anything unanswered, it can take some time and know-how to get this info from others and myself in my own research, I am being patient and am suggesting as well to other newcomers please be friendly and patient too!

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[–] poVoq 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

As for the technical situation:

Contrary to most Lemmy servers, this is actually running on real hardware in my home (with battery-backup and all that) that is connected to a high-speed residential glasfiber connection. It is also running on mostly renewable energy and I have plans to switch it over to fully solar powered at some point.

This is cheaper and easier to scale (up to a certain point) than a VPS in a data-center somewhere, but it also means that uptime will be not quite as good. But this basically just means 99% of the time and not 99.99% ;)

The server I am currently running this on is a 8 core, 32gb RAM machine with a few terabytes of storage all in a raid and with daily snapshots (no off-site backup yet). This server is shared with some other low resource services however and ultimately I will probably move this Lemmy instance to a slightly smaller, but fully dedicated server that I already have (needs a NVMe SSD upgrade for storing the database though). But for now I am basically monitoring the situation and server resource use to decide what size of a server I will need in the medium term. Moving to a fully dedicated server will also allow me to give additional people remote administrative access should a trustworthy person step up at some point.

So far, the above mentioned server is not used anywhere near its capacity, so I think this community can still grow quite a bit more, but I am not planning to scale this indefinitely but rather will close registrations should the load become too much at some point.

As an alternative, there is also a professional data-center nearby that allows co-locating hardware. But renting such rack-space is quite expensive (minimum 300€/month) and that is something I am only willing to consider should there be a significant number of regular donations for running this server.

I am still working on a donation setup, but it will be probably a Liberapay page. For now there is no immediate need to collect donations as the running costs are low and the hardware is already paid for.

[–] piezoelectron 8 points 1 year ago

I just want to say a HUGE thanks for volunteering your resources. I've got an account on another instance that's on a "high quality" VPS, and it's gone down a few times, whereas I haven't experienced any downtime over here :) (nothing with the other instance either, it's an amazing, well-run instance too and I've created a lot of my favourite communities on it).

So thank you!

[–] CelebrationMassive87 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for all your responses!

I realize some of the questions I asked are kind of like asking for a ”For Dummies” book on so many things - so I appreciate you taking the time to provide some of the main info!

[–] poVoq 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On the history and admin situation of this instance:

In March 2022 the Lemmy developers extended an one year free offer to host instances on their servers for anyone interested in starting a independent instance. Back then @ex_06 took up this offer and created this instance.

While I was already a longer time lemmy.ml user and creator of the /c/solarpunk community over there, I was initially not involved in slrpnk.net and also a bit on the fence if I wanted to take over the responsibility of hosting an instance. I did however participate in some of the newly created communities on slrpnk.net via my old (now deleted) account on lemmy.ml

At some point @ex_06 asked me to join the admin team here (for which I created this new account) and a bit later disclosed that due to changed life priorities they would likely not be able to keep running this instance after the free offer by the developers of Lemmy ran out after one year.

As I have been involved in self-hosting for a while and also run some other open-source related communities I tentatively agreed to take over this community and transfer it to my own servers. However, for mostly technical reasons I was initially looking into switching to Kbin instead of Lemmy (see the other post on this). It became clear to me in recent weeks however that Kbin is not quite ready for self-hosting and with the great Reddit migration on the horizon I scrambled to get this community off the lemmy.ml server and onto my main self-hosted server that is sufficiently sized to take on quite a lot of users (relatively speaking). In general this worked out fine so far, and I think now that I spend all this time getting Lemmy to run and optimized it for my server setup, I will very likely stick to it even though Kbin is also quite nice.

[–] poVoq 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Again welcome and thanks for moving this post over to /c/meta :)

In general Reddit refugees are welcome here, but this is a "themed" instance, so it would be preferable for people to join that actually have an interest in the communities hosted on this server and not just because this instance has capacity to right now to take on more members.

A general remark on "rules": an instance is basically independent from the rules set for "Lemmy", meaning that the rules set here are not secondary. However, when subscribing to and interacting with remote communities on other servers it is advisable to try to follow their rules as well to not get individually banned from that community.

In addition to that: to prevent de-federation (slrpnk.net being instance blocked) we will also have to reign in users that cause issues on other servers even if they are not violating rules here strictly speaking. Let's try to be excellent to each other even if we don't always agree on everything :)

[–] CadeJohnson 6 points 1 year ago

This idea of themed instances is quite common in the fediverse, I've noticed. Built in to the user experience is always a "local" feed - which although a user does not have to view it, it is likely to be of interest if one chooses their instance wisely. Likewise, a user's postings appear to the other users who view the local feed. So if the user is not "in tune" with the leanings of the other users, and posts often, local users will tend to block the out-of-tune user -- not because they dislike that user's content or disapprove, just because they're not interested and it clogs up their local feed. At least, that has been my experience. And in that context, it is quite difficult to find one's "home" - there are many servers, but they only advertise their themes in limited ways and there is no centralized shopping market for servers. I suppose it will arise eventually.

[–] perestroika 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

wherever I join I’ll be able to see and post and comment to the content of other Fediverse alternative instances

To some degree. I have a user account on Mastodon and so far, I've had great trouble following discussions and browsing communities on Lemmy. While I'm new to this landscape, it seems that not everything on Fediverse flawlessly interacts with everything else. Interoperability seems to work grudgingly and sometimes.

Also, some servers aren't federated with each other, and then you can't see what's going on there. Myself, I've already got two user accounts, one here on "slrpnk.net" and another on "lemm.ee".

[–] CelebrationMassive87 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Also it’s not personal but if we start looking at admins or hosts or owners of Lemmy/any Fediverse like you’re Darth Vader.. it’s cuz we been through some stuff with our last all-powerful (head of Reddit) who caused everyone to want to leave the platform. Became a power-tripping and profit-based situation on Reddit and we just don’t want it to happen again! Nothing personal FR a lot of the members on Reddit who are leaving are good people (imo)

[–] cerement 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@poVoq provided the nitty gritty – in contrast, my attempt at a broad overview

  • the “Fediverse” is (effectively) a meta-collection of services and instances tied together with the ActivityPub protocol – ActivityPub allows seemingly unrelated services to natively share content back and forth (ie. no lock in)
  • a “service” is the software a a server is running to provide a particular service – ex. photo sharing on servers running PixelFed software, microblogging on servers running Mastodon software, content aggregation on servers running Lemmy software
  • an “instance” is the intersection of a server and a service (ex. @poVoq mentioned their server is running both an instance of Lemmy and an instance of Mastodon) – each instance is independently run, with rules and content and moderation policies and block lists determined by the owner of that instance – if you don’t like the feel of a particular instance, it’s (usually) really easy to move yourself (and your content) to another instance you feel more in line with
[–] CelebrationMassive87 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you know what happens if the server of the chosen instance goes down? Does the account still have access to the Fediverse? Another frame: If somehow the admin / server decides to somehow shut off, would I lose all the content I have linked my account? Would the content from the server be lost/in limbo?

[–] poVoq 2 points 1 year ago

Yes currently that is the case. But normally server admins will warn people well in advance should they have to shut down their instance. Of course emergencies can happen...

On Mastodon it is quite easy to migrate your account to another instance though. Not all the comments etc you posted are migrated, but subscriptions etc. remain intact. I find it highly likely that such a basic migration function will be added to Lemmy as well soon, as the lemmy.ml admins will probably be interested to have some people migrate off their instance again as it is overloaded.