I'd like to first start by welcoming all the new users who have decided to chose sh.itjust.works as their lemmy home instance. It's wild to think that its only been 4 days since I've decided to spin up this instance and we are already nearing 1000 registered users.
During these last few days I've welcomed users from all parts of the world who collectively have created nearly 50 new communities on this instance alone.
Today I want to be transparent and share some of my thoughts, clarify some rules, share some concerns, answer some questions and most importantly introduce the two new instance admins that have been added over the last couple of days. So let's get started!
New Admins
@smorks@lemmy.ca - Some of you may recognized this name from the lemmy.ca instance. This is in fact the same person. I've asked smorks to help out on this instance and he accepted. As the userbase grows having someone whos living some of the similar issues will be bring great value to this instance. We are stronger together!
@donut@sh.itjust.works - donut is a personal friend, new to the fediverse but has agreed to give me a hand should things get out of control. He's a little quiet right now but he'll open up soon enough.
Rules
As you may have noticed, there aren't a whole lot of rules. This might need to change in the future but my goal as of right now is to keep it this way. Being respectful to all users no matter which instance they come from, part of the world they grew up in, personal believe or personal opinion is a absolute must. Our world is already in shambles, we don't need another place for all of us to fight against one another.
Be respectful
No bigotry
No Ads or Spamming
No pornography
You'll may have noticed that a new rule that has been added. No pornography. When pornography is introduced a whole bunch of legal implications need to be considered amongst other things like proper moderation, DMCA notices processes, etc. 4 days ago I would not have thought this to be a problem however I am not in a position to hire legal counsel and implement the elements required to not get this instance shutdown. So for now, no pornography. If the demand grows for this in the future and there is an opportunity to fill this gap I promise I will revisit this rule.
Donations
I've had a few users ask me whether they could start donating. I'll admit I was caught off guard when that happened, thinking of how thoughtful people can be. When I started this instance 4 days ago, I did it because I wanted people to have a home away from reddit, a place where they could come and share interesting topics, debate, discuss and connect.
I'm by no means rich but I have chosen a career that puts me in proximity of things needed to run an instance like this one. It also does help that I really like servers and while some people might really like the latest limited edition sneakers from X company or the latest iPhone/Android device, etc..., I really really like servers, datacenters and networking.
I don't have a plan for accepting donations today but seeing how this community is growing, I will need to consider it soon. You know what's more expensive than running a lemmy instances for thousands of users? a failed marriage.
There are some other options that might be available such as looking for sponsors but I do want to keep this instance about the users and not about corporate so I'll need to think hard about this one.
Whatever is decided I'll make another post with the details.
Concerns
Let's quickly talk about concerns. Most of you already know that many of the reddit mods are orchestrating a protest by blacking out many popular subreddits. Most of us anticipate a large spike in traffic towards our instances during the period of June 12 to 14th. If any of you were around during the Digg days, you may remember how the migration from digg to Reddit went. The early reddit days was filled with outages, performance issues, and frustration.
A lot of people people are looking for what might be the next reddit. We don't knows if lemmy will be it but a lot of people will surely be giving it a shot. During that time many instances including this one will likely deal with some growing pains.
From a resources perspective my biggest worry for this instance is related to the storage. I have CPUs, I have RAM but when it comes to storage, well its an element that has been growing much faster than I had anticipated. I will be keeping a close eye on this however want to wave a little yellow flag so that everyone is aware until I work out a solution.
Q&A
What communities allowed to be homed here?
As long as it follows the rules above and doesn't get any DMCA requests or jeopardize this instance from being shutdown or me in trouble. Go nuts!
What communities allowed to be federated over/subscribed to?
Same as the above and follow rules.
What am I allowed to link to in communities or text posts?
Same as the above and follow rules.
What kind of images am I allowed to upload to the integrated image host?
Storage is something that will likely become a problem in the foreseeable future. You all upload a lot! That being said, don't upload copyrighted materials or anything that will get me in trouble!
As yet another former Redditor trying to make sense of the decentralized model, there is something very comforting knowing "sh.itjust.works". Thanks for doing this.
Just want to say, thanks for this instance and thanks for this type of transparency. I’ve never given Reddit money, but if you do get to the point of wanting/needing help with keeping this going, I’m ready.
I was involved with moderating a listserv of around 15k users in the early 90’s. Most of you won’t know what a listserv was or that the early 90’s was pre-web. I can only imagine the issues you’ll soon be dealing with.
It's crazy that there are so any users already, but not a surprise. This kind of transparency is exactly what a lot of us were looking for, and it's the recipe for a thriving community going forward.
The "no porn" thing may upset some folks, but it makes sense. Porn can be a moderation (and liability) minefield, especially opening the floodgates right away. It could be a net-benefit at some point in the future, but until then it's easy enough to create an account on another instance that wants to take the heat.
And for what it's worth regarding the financial side, donations feel like the way to go. With everything Reddit is doing right now, and other platforms have done in the past, "outside money" is becoming the harbinger of doom for online communities. Plenty of us would be happy to pitch in to keep it in house, especially when you post those sexy resource graphs that would show exactly where our money is going.
Hey Dude! I want to say that if your instance didnt exist I wouldnt have joined Lemmy. I tried to join on fmhy, and that was a disaster. So Im reallt grateful yours is up. Im not certain how lemmy works but I do have a homelab myself and I could host a a few TBs of data for you if it would help. My only complaint about your instance is that as a fellow Canadian, the no bigotry rule has been hard to follow as you haven't honoured our god given right to make fun of the french. :)
When you say no NSFW, does that also mean that we can not federate to such communities from our account as a whole (to be clear, I hope we are not federated to some unsavory ones of course)
Hey, wanted to say thanks again for running an instance with a critical mass of users that's so easy to register on. This is the kind of thing people from the old site need if they're actually going to get on Lemmy. Big instances don't accept new users readily and small instances run into weird issues like needing to get the server to discover the "big" subs that people are interested in.
This one is at the size where the average user can just get in and go. You might say... shit just works.
Hey, so it's my first comment on Lemmy, and I picked this instance specifically because I liked the silly name I'm still figuring out how everything works, but it doesn't seem that hard to understand.
Just to clarify, individual accounts will be in trouble if they subscribe to communities on other servers that break the rules? Or are they blocked by default?
I guess saying thank you for hosting is as worthy of a first comment as can be.
I still don't get every aspect of Lemmy, nor do I think it will ever rival what Reddit was and still could be, but I gotta admit that I like the small community vibe that exists now.
Just commenting here to say thank you for running an instance. I have found the experience of using this instance to be great. I think having instances like this one to accept new reddit users is fantastic and what Lemmy needs to be the successor to reddit. I have some technical expertise so I'm considering starting my own instances, to pitch in and help with the influx of new users. I don't know if I will realize this idea and if I do if it'll be open to other users other than myself, but if I don't, I am happy I have my account here, it's a really good instance.
I gotta say, it's been less than 20 minutes since I joined here, and it feels... refreshing. Tried signing up on some other instances, but they don't respond, seemingly due to overloading. A decentralized network is gaining steam and I couldn't be happier. Thanks for firing up this instance, and cheers!
It's very gracious of you to stand up this instance with your own resources. I'm used to the idea of donating to my fedi home instances, and other fediverse regulars are probably the same way. Just give us the word if you do need donations down the road (ie. for storage upgrades, etc).
Thanks for such an awesome instance that to me personally rivals the main lemmy.ml. I will most likely continue to use this instance as my main account, and will definitely consider donating in the future, whenever you open that up.
Thank you very much for setting up this instance. I'm honored to be one of the first folks to join up. Let me know if there's anything we can do to help.
Hi y'all, just got here to have a feel for Lemmy. So far so good.
Have been keeping an eye on Lemmy for a while, but the recent dumpster fire that reddit is becoming pushed me to register.
Guidelines are clear and I hope the influx of new users won't be to hard on the admins. I'll keep an eye our for a donation option to help out.
Hello everyone, coming here from reddit. Hopefully the federated concept catches on because I'm tired of the cycle of cool things becoming crappier over time to please investors or make a quick buck. I had mostly stopped interacting with mainstream reddit years ago due to the deteriorating quality of posts and discussions.
Some communities I'd love to see over here include: askhistorians, askscience, digitalart, gadgets, gamedev, hardware, indiegaming, mycology, nutrition, the 'learn' subreddits (ie learnmath, learnprogramming, ect), philosophy, pixelart, proceduralgeneration, and stopdrinking.
If anyone knows any good communities to 'subscribe' to that seem like they'd fit the kind of thing I'm looking for I'd be happy to hear them.
Hopefully joining a server of self described networking enthusiast makes this transition as seamless as could reasonably be expected lol. I like the rules here too. A very solid foundation to start on.
I'm hoping this takes off, I enjoy the concept of decentralization. I'm just hoping that it is accessible enough to get a critical mass of users to migrate from Reddit. I have a feeling I'll be missing out on some of the smaller, local community subreddits that I have subscribed to on Reddit for some time. It's one thing to get the adventurous, technology-inclined crowd. Another thing to get people to join from communities like r/Minneapolis or r/bicycling (a lot of whom aren't even aware of the current drama).
Thank you for this instance, truly. I love the idea behind lemmy, but have some doubts regarding the practices and stances of the major instances, so this seems perfect for me. I hope lemmy takes off and can scale as gracefully as possible in the years to come.
Thanks for this! I hope this lasts long term and that you enjoy running this also. If it starts to becomes too much, don't be afraid to ask for what you need, we'll help you out.
Hi everyone! This is my first post, so far I've enjoyed the platform, it's very easy to get started, thanks for the server!. I've noticed that some communities don't show up when I search, does anyone know why this is? Or does anyone know of a community directory or index?
I was planning on hosting my own personal instance locally, but this has put me off a little haha!
How does that actually work then, does every image posted to a sub I’m following automatically download to my instance, even without me ever seeing it? Or would it only be the posts I actually see in the app/site?
Can anyone ELI5 how federation works? Does it mean that I can only subscribe to communities that this instance is federated with, or is that just what shows up on the front page or something?
Can you create a dashboard of sorts so we can all see the CPU RAM and storage usage? Would be highly interested. Also if you're accepting donations of storage I have some spare drives 😅
I love the idea of Lemmy and I'm really hoping it can take off. I'd be more than happy to donate to an instance to help keep it ad-free and free from corporate influence. Good luck!
WRT the storage, would you prefer us use something like Imgur or is there an element of understanding scaling because we'll want to use the integrated image host in the long run?
Not gonna lie, definitely joined solely for the name and cute mouse logo but I'm happy with the decision so far!
However I can't seem to get any of the apps to work with this instance. It's either not listed (Jerboa) or the url won't add (lemmur). Unless there's a specific way to set up the url that I'm unaware of. Anyone else have any insight? Or is it just a browser thing until it gains more traction?
Thanks for hosting. As a former retired technologist, let me encourage you to consider that growth can follow a logistic growth curve, which can resemble exponential growth.
I’d love to see this community succeed. But it’s long-term sustainability will need to account for the costs of keeping these instances running at scale.
Would love to see someway that we the community can participate in supporting the continued operation of this community.
hello, what if porn, ok, what if porn but!! hosted elsewhere? dmca can't dmca if u not host of dmca'd thing. lmk if that sounds good to you
also, not to propose we create them, but hypothetically, what if someone hosted one of the good ol' "watch people die" communities? it's not porn, it's not particularly disrespectful if there's no insulting, but that'd be a very extreme way to test the limits. just wondering how you'd approach that. again, i have no interest in hosting or participating in that, but i'm curious about your PoV regarding it.
Thanks for hosting this instance! You're doing amazing work. Any chance we can get some cool custom themes for sh.itjust.works? I know you probably have a ton of priorities with the blackout coming up but would love to see this eventually!
Thanks for putting this together. I guess for completely random reasons you are our shepherd away from reddit, and it's cool to hear running this kinda thing is a passion of yours. Cheers from Scotland! 🏴
We recently passed a law about requiring age verification for social media (will come into effect next year), so hopefully that doesn't end up impacting you. If it does, please post about it.
I'm also interested in donating, so please post if that ever becomes an issue. I'm also interested in how things are configured on the backend (I've worked with servers before), so meta posts are interesting to me to read, even if I'm not able to chime in with recommendations. You sound capable enough, so I'll be focusing my efforts to help on contributing to areas I'm able to (I'm competent with Rust and interested in helping work on Jerboa).
Anyway, thanks again! I hope this instance sees enough success to give Reddit refugees a home, but not so much that it causes you stress. 😄
I signed up very quickly and (of course) didn't log my random password. Tried the reset link a few times but don't seem to be getting any links to the reset page.
I'll wait to see if they come through -- thankfully still logged on where I initially signed up -- but still wanted to make you aware.
EDIT: Also sent you a DM. Thanks!
EDIT2: TheDude abides, and fixed this for us! I was able to reset successfully. Huzzah!
Hello. I decided to move to this instance from my previous one. Im glad to be here. Just wanna know, if this instance is in it for the long run xd? Just wanna make sure my account doesnt go down with the instance, as I plan to permanently stay here, or atleast for a good while xd.
So ... Eastern Canada, eh? Given that this describes an area east of ... Kingston to the Atlantic Ocean, can you narrow it down? I note the intended bilingularity (a word I just made up) so am curious.
RIP the marriage dude. You're a real one for hosting this o7
About the storage; have you considered deleting posts and comments above a certain age? I don't think it's expected of a single person to host the amount of data that comes with sites like these in the long term. I'm sure I'm just telling you something you already thought of or something that doesn't work etc etc but I figured id say something idk
Side note what's the hardware cost you've invested into this. How much would I actually have to put down to host a lemmy server or something like it? Always been curious