When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it'll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?
Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:
- Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
- Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
- I'm seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it'll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me...)
- A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he's a list of mobile apps you can use, here's how to sign up on patreon... etc).
Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for "joining") is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
The proverbial "call to arms" would be appropriate.
We've got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I'm not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that's it).
I got started here so i could ask questions. Planning on starting an instance on the oracle free tier.
But if I use my own instance to login, but follow the same communities on lemmy.ml , would it make much difference to the traffic/load? Is all I am doing is moving the auth load and nothing else?
Be careful with Oracle - they are known to suspend those "free" instance with no warning. Never trust a tech company that employs more lawyers than engineers. If you're willing to stick to free - AWS (as much as I hate to say it) is a better choice. The whichever is the cheapest t-type micro instance can run free indefinitely. Beware as well, though - AWS is the most expensive if you want to do /anything/ more that stick to the free tier.
I'm personally sticking to DigitalOcean as for my small personal projects they have proven to have the absolutely best networking out of all the providers. They have also always issued advanced notices about potential outages due to hardware maintenance and yet my stuff had never actually gone down. I suspect it's because they're looking after their employees in some great way and so get to hire the absolute best.
Linode used to be a good choice as well, but now that they got acquired by Akamai their networking quality appears to have gone down. It wasn't the best to begin with, but they had a plethora of distros with hosted repo mirrors to choose from, and I appreciated that. Not sure if they still host the mirrors, to be honest.
You can also check the other big 2 - GCP and Azure, but I personally have not spent much time on them, so can't comment.
If folks can sign up on your instance and use it as their gateway to the lemmy fediverse, its tremendously helpful for distributing load.
The challenge is, letting people know your instance exists, and when they finally do and you get 30 signups per hour, scaling your instance to keep up.
Long term, you also have to deal with all the sysadmin crap (scaling up/down based on load, security and updates, backups, assholes that DDOS your instance because they don't like your moderation decisions, copyright take downs, legal requests, etc).