When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you're trusting somebody else's infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.
If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.
Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I'm trusting.
Is this running on:
- A $5 VPS?
- A dedicated server with redundant storage?
- Someone's mini PC under their desk?
- AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
- A database with proper backups?
- A server with no backups at all?
I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them. Their solution was - just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx https://lemmy.radio/.
That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)
If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying enterprise hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load? Do you even have a plan my friends?
I don't know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.
I'm not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.
Just put some basics in /about:
- Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc.
- Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM
- Storage: 2 TB NVMe
- Backups: Daily, retained 30 days
- Media backups: Yes / No
- Off-site backups: Yes / No
- Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large
- Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.
That tells me infinitely more about whether I'm comfortable making an instance my home.
- Have admin(s) ever hosted any production software before? First time?
- are there even backups?
- Is there even any plans for scalability? What if your traffic goes 4x? what about 20x? do you have a plan beyond banning me and removing everythig I ever posted?
And honestly, backups matter to same tune as CPU model.
Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.
But you can't make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers.
Is that the reason why all lemmy instances dont let you upload more than 5Mb media? probably.
If you cant afford hosting costs - holy fuck, just stop fucking saying "everyone welcome" if you then going to ban those same "welcomed" people after they post 10 image memes (thx https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ and https://lemmy.radio/ and https://lemmy.ml/). no no - 👏you 👏 cant 👏 afford 👏 non-text 👏 users 👏, - instead you falsely accuse people of spamming and banning their accounts. No wonder lemmy is at 35k MAU. Hardware poor admins - you don't even know what spamming is, you shouldn't have ~~kids~~ users if you cant afford them, dont invite them in or just advertise your instances as text-only.
Hardware poor admins - stop inviting people. you have no capacity and only actively harming lemmy adoption.
There should be a list of such instances that should be inviting people at all.
Instance infrastructure shouldn't be a mystery.
If you're asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they're building it on. You likely cant afford non-text users anyways.
MAU is a number that matters to corporations and advertisers. No one running a Lemmy server is either of these so that metric isn't really useful or say anything.
Lemmy has been going for 6 years now and it is still new. It isn't even version 1.0. Success in Lemmy is not what you think it is. The most successful Lemmy server is Hexbear because it stands alone and is growing the community they want.
trust me - I really wanted it to work. but lemmy is really this bad.
MAU measures whether people actually use the platform.
And Reddit has spent those six years practically begging users to leave:
Yet Lemmy is still around 35k MAU.
At some point "we're still new" isn't an excuse. Your biggest competitor keeps shooting itself in the foot and you're still not growing. its not working chief
Lemmy doesn't have any competitors, it isn't competing. It isn't what you think it is. You are still using a corporate framing for a non corporate system. There is no company, there is no manger, there is no goal. This measurement is only to say 35k people are using it now, but it doesn't matter is my entire point. "Lemmy" is a federated network for enthusiasts with no corporate direction that is still in early development. There is no competitor, growth isn't the purpose of it, it is software made by communists.
Isn't Lemmy older than 6 years though? Dunno on the federation aspect, but sorting posts on Lemmy instances by oldest first shows a few older posts.
Still, by the time these oldest posts were made, Reddit was already some 10 years old to my knowledge, and we can't even be sure if their active users' numbers are real due to lack of transparency and these numbers coming from a single source instead of being a sum of several independent ones.
And at least an impression of mine, but in these ~4 years I've been around, engagement seems to be growing slowly but steadily. And I'd need to put on a graph the data shared about the growth of the fediverse from another community, but the numbers overall seem to be growing there too.
On taking down Reddit, I'd advise against it. Competition is what lets products and services improve. What I'd expect in an organic competition, however, is for Reddit to deflate into a shadow of its former self, keeping only a nicher usefulness, like Tumblr did and thus becoming just another forum.
Jesus Christ, everyone here seems to have invented their own definition of what Lemmy is.
Except the actual Lemmy developers describe it as:
They've been calling it a Reddit alternative since at least 2020.
So no, I'm not imposing some imaginary "corporate framing" onto Lemmy. I'm using basically the same framing its own developers used to explain why they built it.
And "there is no manager or corporate goal" doesn't mean adoption suddenly becomes meaningless. If you're building an alternative to corporate-controlled link aggregators, whether anybody actually adopts the alternative fucking matters.
Otherwise what are we celebrating? Software existing?
And that's why 35k MAU matters to me. Reddit has spent years handing alternatives opportunities on a silver platter, and Lemmy hasn't capitalized on them.
You can personally define success as "35k enthusiasts are happy." Fine.
But stop pretending your definition of Lemmy is the official one while telling everyone else "you don't understand what Lemmy is." Even the developers explicitly called it a Reddit alternative.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.
It is an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.
Including you.
Yes, they’ve been calling it an alternative, not a competitor. They created Lemmy because their communist & anti-imperialist subreddits kept getting banned from Reddit. Such communities are antithetical to capitalism, so they’d likely be banned from any corporate platform, not only Reddit.
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Lemmy
That's just semantics. An alternative competes for the same users.
Your own source says Lemmy was created because Reddit was banning their communities. The whole point was giving those people somewhere else to go.
Call it an alternative, competitor, or communist escape pod. 😂 The question is the same:
What good is an alternative to Reddit if almost nobody adopts it?
Dude the number of daily users today is so astronomically higher than I ever would have imagined five years ago. I literally thought it would stay a small community and maybe max out around a hundred daily posts and I was happy with that because I liked the community. A project being worked on for "almost nobody" is still very worthwhile if the existing community is happy to keep participating, but what it is today is not "almost nobody".
That it has the model of reddit without it's userbase.
Lemmy is never going to be as big as reddit. It financially cannot be. It doesn't want to be.
Now, their are several options you can take from here. You can either spin up your own instance which abides by your own rules; join an existing instance and learn to live with the rules there; or don't change anything, keep on whining about reality not altering itself to your whims, become bitter and annoyed and eventually leave.
Which of these options do you think will give you most happiness in the long run?
Why not? That's exactly the kind of assumption I'm questioning.
Federation is supposed to make scaling easier to distribute. More users can mean more instances, more admins, more donations, more infrastructure, and costs spread across the network.
"It can't grow because we can't afford growth" isn't some fundamental property of federation. It's an infrastructure problem to solve.
And "it doesn't want to be" keeps coming up. Lemmy is software. It doesn't want anything. Different users, admins, and developers clearly have very different ideas about what it should become.
I'm interested in seeing how far it can go, not declaring its ceiling in advance.
The communists & anti-imperialists who regularly get banned from corporate social media have adopted it. Obviously that represents “almost nobody” in comparison to corporate media’s user base. Anyone else who adopts Lemmy is a side-effect to the developers’ core goal of creating protected communities for anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists.
is that why lemmy has no hardware resources - they all communists?
also - are non communists allowed to join?
Most Lemmy users aren’t communists, so they obviously are allowed to join, except in the case of Lemmygrad, which is explicitly Marxist-Leninist.
Consider also that Lemmy isn’t the entire threadiverse/fediverse. PeerTube, for instance, is optimized for video, which dwarf the storage requirements of images.
"Alternative" doesn't necessarily mean "competitor."
lemmy is almost twice the size of lobsters, if we're just using the stuff in the repo description.
So what do you suggest we do with our 0 USD marketing war chest?
Lemmy isn’t really our competitor. From a financial perspective, each person who switches from Reddit to Lemmy is a sum loss to both Reddit and Lemmy. Hosting costs money, and unlike Reddit, Lemmy has no advertising revenue to overcome that cost.
Kill the corporate marketer in your head.
Edit to add that quite a few Redditors would be a nightmare to moderate. We don’t even want those assholes. Lemmy instances are communities of volunteers, not revenue streams.