how does that work - I mean, who's paying the bills for the instance if it's unmoderated? weird
Probably a self-hosted server.
What's that? It's on somebody's property. Someone is paying for power, connectivity, and air conditioning.
The host is on vacation and has no backup admin.
Damn, not sure if this is a joke or speculation, but imagine the shit storm they're gonna come back to. I kinda feel bad for them if they didn't intend for this to happen and the cleanup they'll have to do, but at the same time, they kinda shoulda made sure they had a backup, or at least closed sign-ups while they were gone (assuming it wasn't a medical emergency).
They could be in the hospital or anything if there's only one.
Definitely a nightmare to come back if that's the case.
Speculation, I have no idea what they can up be to
I host my instance in my house on my old PC. I'm going to pay my power bill either way. It actually autopays. So if I had a medical emergency and couldn't do my admin duties, my instance would keep on going for a very long time.
I don't have any users on my instance other than me, so I don't need to worry about this specific thing. But paying the miniscule amount of power that my server consumes would be trivial.
What's the benefit of running your own instance?
As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive....
Honestly, nothing.
The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn't going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.
I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.
With that said,
Basically everything else is downsides.
Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.
PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren't uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.
Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @ruud@lemmy.world doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn't constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)
And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don't really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.
There isn't an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances.... through lemmy itself.
On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.
Here are the incoming stats, from my "small" instance.
In terms of outgoing, it's very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.
tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.
Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.
I don't need to worry about the instance going down due to attacks, because no one is going to spend their time attacking an instance with one person. They want to attack an instance with everyone.
I also don't need to worry about defederation drama. If I'm not subscribed to any communities on those problem instances, I don't even see the problem, and my server doesn't rehost those problems. I was originally on lemmy.world, and then Beehaw defederate with lemmy.world. But I wanted to see Beehaw's content. Now I can see both. No one is going to defederate with me because no one on my instance (literally just me) is doing anything that would get us defederated.
I also don't need to wait for my instance to update to get new features. I literally just update my instance as soon it gets posted to Docker Hub.
I also just find it fun to host my own! I already had my domain name and wasn't using it for anything. I already had a server ready to go. So why not?
In my case, the major upside is that I make federation choices, not someone else. I prefer to be as openly federated as possible.
Ok but it could be a raspberry pi chilling in someone's house using utilities they already pay for anyway.
Maybe it's not actually abandoned. Just providing plausible deniability that way.
It's running an older version of Lemmy, so it's not being updated.
It's not necessarily super expensive for someone who wants to host an instance, whether it's at home or via server providers. Hosting a GOOD and high-traffic instance might cost more but still any nerd with disposable income can do it if they want.
that instance is full to the brim of crazies who have lost all grip on reality. they feel nothing but hate
It got really bad just over the past two days. I'm not sure if it's a raid from some right wing troll farm, or what it is. Defederation makes things easy though
Thank you for the update, seems like a reasonable approach
Unfortunate but very much necessary to stop the spread of their hatred. This is why it's important to have a team of admins, so that it's less likely that the person running the server doesn't just disappear one day and they can continue maintaining it even if the main person isn't there. Maybe if you're an individual instance you can't afford to hire a team of people, but you could get a group of friends together and have all of you work together to run it, think of it like a group passion project it's important to make sure that something like this doesn't end up abandoned otherwise it can cause problems for others if people start abusing it.
I know a lot of people are in doubt about how bad it is, but I went there and I looked at it and it's honestly terrible worse than the Donald on Reddit (if anyone can remember that) we don't want to rehost that kind of stuff on this server, we don't want to be associated with those kinds of people, it's not worth it. They can still have their free speech on their platform, just not on our server and we don't have to put up with it.
Yes they can keep their hate on their own instances but they are not welcome in our house. Keep reporting these extremists wether they are right of left wing - because it's a never-ending fight.
It’s interesting that they have their own instance, but can’t stand the fact that they got defederated, and have to keep finding ways to get that sweet attention they crave.
That's why it is important that everyone keeps reporting these things.
Question here. If a user suscribed to world wants to keep seing content from that instance, cant he just suscribe to some subs over there? I'm still trying to figure that part out. I'm on ml but can see some content from world.
No, you will not see content from Rammy on LW. If you want to interact with both you'll need to have an account on an instance that federates both. I'm sure there are some out there, and if not starting your own is an option.
As a user of lemmy.ml you don't have to worry about what Lemmy.world defederates from. You'll still see Lemmy.World content and lemmy.ml will pull directly from other instances on its own
That's not what they asked though.
The question wasn't that self-centered, it was asking if a user from an instance that defederated from another instance could still access content from the defederated instance through a direct manual subscription.
Fair enough!
Never even heard of it, but good looking out!
Good
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