Between Explaining Computers, Jeff Geerling & Network Chuck on Youtube you should be able to get a server up and running on an old machine. You can then install Lemmy via docker or whatever.

A home network server can be pretty safe & simple, exposing that server to the internet should take a little more thought and planning.

Digital Ocean or similar is likely the simplest way to try it.

https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets

Create a $4pm Ubuntu droplet & install Lemmy.

Probably cheaper to run per hour than an old pc and install of the OS is instant and disposable. If you do something stupid or get hacked, you just delete and start fresh…no need to worry about l33t haxxors all in your home base.

Not watched but this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fzCUEpFnDg

You’ve got it!

People just won’t lie about ill gotten gains, tax returns or funding on lemmy instances. The green bar will be truth.

Reddit was maintained by unpaid mods. It it now being shat on by unpaid mods.

I appreciate the need for funding I just don’t see the ‘funds health bar’ being useful fediverse server feature.

Awesome & thank you, makes sense.

I’m freeloading from FMHY, kbin.social and mastondon.uk as I try to figure out how this works and been playing around with self hosting instances, this is interesting.

A small fee for a safe and reliable place seems reasonable, cheers for the post :)

Thanks, appreciate the insight. I did not consider that and am still trying to get grasp of things.

I mentioned Pat & Theo as it seems on the few occasions they do reach out to keep the servers running beyond current donations, people do reach out to help with running costs. People don’t jump ship and the community persists for decades.

If a linux distro is struggling to keep up, freeloading users will often jump ship too. Linux isn’t short on distros to choose from or small community distros that died.

I’m not sure what you provide…what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service?

Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.

I’d prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I’d hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve’s, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.

A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I’d need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don’t get my direct debit date in sync.

A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we’d need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.

Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.

In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat’s Slackware or Theo’s OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.

A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that’s currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.

Tolerance of own farts > tolerance of the farts of others

Working between servers.

Just simple stuff like searching, adding, customizing feeds. Clicking an alert to take me to the content will take me to a server I’m not logged into and I need to go back and find the same post via my own server to comment. Not the end of the world for me but likely a big issue for many potential users if the are use to mainstream social media that ‘just works’.

I’m not sure the ‘like email’ thing helps.

Email is confusing and not what most people use to connect with others. I don’t know anyone who met via email.

Trying to get groups of people to connect meaningfully over email didn’t work. Messenger apps did work as they removed user freedom to top-reply and break everything.

I’m vaguely interested in IT, seflhost a little and compile a kernel from time to time but email still seems esoteric and confusing to me.

Join the fediverse! It’s as simple as setting up an email server!

Good points.

I’ll be going back to Reddit too but I suspect everything will not be as it once was and much of it will be finding out where others have fled to.

There was ~1-5000 people on here over the last year or so which isn’t huge in terms of subreddits, it seems to have jumped to 100,000+ in the past week or two. Teh current content seems reasonable for an ~100k subreddit.