this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Fedigrow
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To be honest as mentioned elsewhere I'm not the most convinced about having all of the theme instances managed by rglullis.
Raphael, don't get me wrong, you are doing a very good job, and I really hope you'll succeed with your new NLNet grant, but having all of those instances depending on you, even if you seem to have a backup person, seems risky.
@[email protected], also the Euro 2024 is starting later this week, I think it's just too late to migrate now if we want a decent level of activity during the event. We can always revisit later, but I wouldn't move now.
You're not wrong in the slightest.
Glad to see we agree!
It feels a bit of a Catch-22, doesn't it?
The first topic-based I started was selfhosted. Not by choice, but because the mods of /r/selfhosted refused to run their own instance and instead went to LW. The others have similar stories. There are also instances that I went as far as setting up the domain name and creating the first communities (roll20), but shutting them down after I noticed that there was already some other instance (ttrpg) filling a similar need.
I'll gladly get the instances out of my back, if they grow to the point that enough people are using it and willing to moderate it. But they are never going to grow if key members in the network keep rejecting it on the grounds of "I don't trust it", will it?
Aside from the differences that Communick is a commercial venture while the "larger" instances are "begware", I honestly don't know what is that I am asking that makes people reject it so vehemently.
I agree with most of what you are saying.
I guess in this case programming.dev is a solid choice enough for a !linux community, in the same vein as ttrpg.network was for DnD and RPG.
@[email protected] what do you think?
On a completely different level, I would gladly give a few communities back to other people. I guess there are only so many people having time and energy to keep the whole thing alive, and we are all stretched a bit too thin.
Instance management is a much more important commitment than moderation, though.
The Linux thing is already done. I was just saying I would've preferred a less "Linux is only for programmers" style home. But for Dungeons and Dragons, Table Top Role Playing Game Network is the epitome of perfection in a home.
It's important but it isn't a huge amount of work, especially if you have a good team to spread the load.
It also helps that I am running a managed instance hosting business, and I should be more comfortable doing this than the average hobbyist?
Yes, I'd imagine there are efficiencies to doing that - we inherited a thriving medium-sized instance so, despite one of the team having spun up their own Lemmy instance, there was a lot of "learning on the job" required to get everything humming along nicely. I imagine that, with more experience it becomes easier.
On the other hand, having a lot of instances managed by you increase the impact in case something happens
Then can we do it with one, maybe?
I guess we could. For soccer.forum, as I said, it's too close to the Euro for a migration, we can maybe revisit later?
But actually I just remembered there was https://fanaticus.social/
Do you want any more commitment than a business running 10+ instances for almost a year now? Paying $1000+ per year on the domains alone?
Forgive my bluntness, but it seems that the fact that Communick is (or tries to be) a for-profit venture bothers you?
That's what I mean. You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances. Could those costs lead you to stop the project at some point? I know you don't like begware, but that's another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently)
No worries. Actually it's not really the business model that concerns me (I'm neutral), but the centralization of instances managed by one entity.
If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.
Having one instance down, even for weeks (LW last year) still allowed other instances to operate
"Begware" seems so negative - I like to recall the maxim: "If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product." The rise the Big Tech social media firms was propelled by convenience and there being no obvious upfront costs. Enshittification has shown us what the actual costs are.
The Fediverse shows a better way to do it but, if you aren't selling your users data, then someone has to pay. If one person is footing the bill, then that is a single point of failure. Luckily, costs are quite low, so it doesn't need a lot of people to chip in to cover the costs - I will.admit to being concerned when we launched the feddit.uk fundraiser, as I wasn't sure how much we'd raise but, within a couple of days we'd got almost enough to cover the year's costs with a good steady stream of donations. It means the instance's financial future is secure.
The costs of running the instances is sunk already, because I run them on the same infra that I use for my projects, and it's not a couple of hundred dollars per month that is going to make or break things for me. The worst case scenario is "I go back to a full-time job and Communick becomes yet-again a side-project/hobby". The case where any of these instances become big enough to the point that it demands more from me is better than any of the current situation.
I honestly don't see it this way. Activity through the network has been abysmal. Operating an instance at this level should be incredibly easy, but even then we have things like bigger instances having issues with lack of moderators, basic federation issues between the larger instances mostly because of network latency... all that show that we should be collectively putting a lot more resources into this if we truly want to have a credible alternative to Reddit and Facebook Groups.
I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but Lemmy feels pretty much dead already. My feed is mostly content from the communities that I've been posting + the two of three stubborn users (like yo)u who have been trying as hard as possible to make something out of it.