You can contribute by making bug reports on apps, or donating to instances! Bug reports are much much more useful to devs than you'd think.
You're contributing too! Memes, posts, comments, are all vital for Lemmy. Without it there is no community to interact with via the instances/apps.
My thought is that you are helping. By being an active user posting content, you have helped to boost this places numbers. And the more content there is the more people we can bring over to this side.
Such a fucking wholesome post and comment section, I am loving this.
Thanks OP!
The content you create or share, discussions you contribute to and curate using votes are useful for growing Lemmy too. Just read rules and maintain good ethics.
You can also point more people here, just show them https://join-lemmy.org/instances and cool apps like Liftoff or Thunder or perhaps Sync, and tell them to not overthink their choice (they can always switch accounts/apps). Do not introduce them to Lemmy on desktop at first where the federation is not very smooth without add-ons.
There are browser add-ons? I hadn't considered that.
I've gotten pretty used to the browser interface.
Not plugins as in browser addons I don't think (tho those might exist too)
On mobile, no time for links, but you can google buuzzwords:
Checkout userscripts. A feature from a time when the experience of the web was still supposed to be hackable and not designed by corporate (you can in theory still create your own personal UI/UX for most sites). You'll want a userscript manager like tampermonkey. Disclaimer that if you don't understand javascript you could run malicious code, though the community provides some safety. If you want an extra safety layer copy/paste the code into ChatGPT and ask if its safe to install.
There is also a skin system I'll following up on
AFAIK no add-ons change the UI substantially. You just get a button or automatic redirect to view the current page’s content via your home instance.
Then start learning :)
Making your own instance is easier than you would expect you just need a capable server if you want it to grow
Eh, kinda. It's comparatively easy to set up an instance, as in "renting a VPS, figuring out how to use docker, installing docker, installing and configuring a reverse proxy, getting an SSL certificate, getting a domain, linking it all together, figuring out docker compose, and finally getting the instance connected to the open web".
But the upkeep of an instance is a whole other story. Constantly keeping an eye on user numbers, server and client performance, storage usage, needing to scale the machine up with a growing userbase while also managing the cost and somehow finding the cash to run it, plus the dread of being responsible for the data of users on that instance, requires a strong mind and a lot of time.
While the technicalities are somewhat "easy", expecting anyone to spin up an instance and manage the influx of hundreds to thousands of users in a short time seems unrealistic.
Yeah i noticed the issue, i was just talking about maybe having an instace to just experiment or just to make the main instances less crowded. I wanted to make a personal instance just for me but it reached the limit of my current knowledge so now I'm stuck. I wanted to do it on a single Raspberry pi but it somehow doesn't work, but that's off topic. The moderation of the own instance is entirely another issue that you have to think about when trying to make a big instance
Hey buddy, you just did!
Look for [email protected] at least i belive it was toast, the canvas gets hosted this weekend and is like lemmy /place
There’s a lotta love here, so much good work by the devs too!
