I finally decided to create an account with the impending age verification implementation on Reddit.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself
founded 2 years ago
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It's a steady two or so new accounts per day. Occasionally Reddit does something silly and we get a wave of them, but that hasn't happened for a few months.
Reddit did something silly and I’m in the process of moving on. A few things actually.
Lemmy was recommended as a good substitute, this instance seemed the best, so here I am.
Welcome!
Thank you.
🤨
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This made me crack up.
Cheers!
Any way I can help promote this Lemmy on Reddit?
Bring it up occasionally when appropriate. Most active Redditors know about Lemmy already. Don't get too spammy or you'll find yourself in Reddit's sinbin.
We aren't trying to steal Reddit's userbase. We are not equipped to handle millions of users and frankly, the whole of Lemmy is not, either. The admin and moderation tools are not mature enough to deal with activity on Reddit's scale. We're happy to organically grow and while I think most users are either refugees or dual-citizens from Reddit, I'd be happier to pluck up users who have never been Redditors in the first place.
I have gripes with Reddit.
Well not Reddit themselves, but the moderators who run many of the large subs and Reddit's inaction on the rampant censorship and biased moderation. And I mean both sides politically. Subs that represent countries, like Australia, states, or even cities should not have anonymous mods. Reddit needs to hand off moderation to the Country/State/City and have them appoint, and be responsible for moderators. Right now, it's a free for all.
And since Reddit isn't obviously doing anything about it, the best thing we can do is give users an alternative to Reddit. That not only removes their monopoly and power, but lights a fire under their arse.
So here I am, looking for ways to do that.
Now we come to the messy point where a service becomes so integrated into the publics lives that maybe it should be considered a utility.
Subreddits have often been taken over by a complete replacement of the mod team and people hate that but now you call for rules about who can run certain Subreddits?
Should we be confirming the residency of mods here?
I'm not pushing either direction but it gets messy fast.
I will neither confirm or deny that i am actually an Emperor Penguin in Antarctica.
now you call for rules about who can run certain Subreddits?
Yeah, you know, the subs that represent countries should probably be run by someone who officially represents that country. You can still have your anonymous, unofficial subreddits, no argument there. Just like how you have official Youtube and X accounts.
Should we be confirming the residency of mods here?
Why? It's not using a official Australian domain, anyone can spin up a Lemmy instance on some random looking Australian domain and federate it. If it was using an official domain, like some gov.au one, then yes.
A country is welcome to make r/Australiaoffical or something, if they care. I'm not sure why they would. Reddit has like 500 million users per week but id guess that half of that number are actual real individuals.
It's not the critical resource we all see it as.
How big would this server have to get before you would want the Australian government involved?
I suppose an Aus gov Twitter would have to be called Galah!
Pink and Grey being the obvious colour scheme.
Whoever has been spamming Lemmy with that bot, davriellelouna or whatever they've called it this week, i think has deteriorated the salience of discussions to a degree. But these accounts a getting tagged really quickly in the last week, i suppose this is something Lodion and Nath are doing in the background. Cheers for your efforts admins!
I have literally never seen that bot in action. I saw a heap of deleted posts in a thread once, that was it.
Whatever they're doing to prevent it being obnoxious is working I reckon!
Well, okay. You know more about this stuff than i, it might not be a bot. If you view by Local theres usually a post in the top ten most active still up from their latest account.
Theres someone that keeps launching new lemmy.world accounts and spamming some AZ communities. A look at their history and you can see they're doing the same with British and European communities as well. The accounts when left to run, quickly reach the hundreds of posts, with only a few comments so there seems to be someone actively controlling it to some degree? Some of the comments were... interesting. They don't seem malicious, from what i've seen at least, but definitely spammy, which can undercut quality of discussions.
So i don't know if this is a bot or not, but its kinda insane behaviour, relentless, if its a person doing all of it.
They definitely spam !movies@lemmy.world , I usually crosspost their posts to !movies@piefed.social
The LW admins usually catch them quickly
afaik we’re still around 150~ visits per day, it’s just us in here 😄 i suspect until the admins agree to list the site on google/bing growth will be negative/sideways
We're pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don't want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight.
It's already a problem of us both being Perth-based: we're weak on admin coverage first thing Eastern Time as that tends to be 3am-7am here. An explosion of users and an early morning incident is something it's just easier to avoid.
At the end of the day, we're a pair of nerdy full-time family guys doing this as a hobby. We aren't interested in monetising this site or making it our jobs.
Are donations still meeting costs? You say not monetising, but it shouldnt be a charity.
Costs aren't actually that high when the nerd labour is free. Hosting costs were around $200/mo last time I looked. It's really a @lodion@aussie.zone question, though.
I'm travelling for work again.. and will be again quite a bit in the near future. When I'm home and have some time, I'll answer this properly.
Short version: I'm paying the bulk of costs out of my own pocket at the moment. The bulk of once off donations were used up a few months back. A few monthly supporters offset it a little. I'll figure out the numbers and share when I can.
There is no way you should be paying that on your own. I thought things were good with once a year payments, but i'll look at setting payments up for monthly instead. I'll increase the amount as well.
Edit: So monthly doesn't seem to be available on Kofi in many options, i'll just top the kitty up more now and increase the amount paid annually from next July, if that suits?
We're pretty protective of our ~500ish regulars. We are not a large instance, but our users are very engaged. We don't want them to be drowned out by a massive influx of new accounts utterly shifting the vibe of the site overnight
Well i hadn't considered that, but perhaps i should've considering the effect that one bot account has had.
Yeah, i think Lodions a great steady hand on the tiller. For me, i feel like AZ could become the basis for a wider 'fediverse first' set of social media alternatives for Australians. That would take more active growth and discussions and actions on direction in that vein. Lodion has a different vision to me on this projects development, and Lodions the lead on this experiment, and we've hashed that out before.
There are definitely practical, time consuming administrative hurdles that Lodion and Nath have highlighted that a user and cheerleader like me rarely notices, i think this is a key driver behind the non-listing. The only thing i can say to that is there seems a fairly technologically knowledgable and engaged set of people on AZ that might be willing to muck in to support the project in material administrative ways. There are some particular users that i'm surprised aren't admins from the beginning tbh, but thats my 'on the outside looking in' assessment of a situation i don't really know about.
yeah I was looking to setup a piefed instance just to keep touch on how much admin is involved but I can barely commit myself to mod, let alone run a server in my spare time
It must be time consuming, especially due to the constant monitoring.
Could be this too