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
@[email protected] - 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!
@[email protected] - 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!
I wonder if you could also just disable image/video uploads? I wouldn't personally see an issue with just needing to link imgur or other websites to display images on this frontend. Definitely going to be a problem soon otherwise.
I think they are only hosted on the instance of their own community and the other instances reference to it. My memory is shit so I could be wrong though.
I'm pretty sure everything that this instance is subscribed to is hosted locally. This is going to become a problem going forward as the instance grows.
Now that I'm beginning to understand how this works, I'm figuring out that the most efficient instances would be ones where the user base has similar interests and subscriptions.
In terms of bandwidth/server load, the burden is the same when only one user subscribes to a community as it is for every user to subscribe to that same community. In other words, there is no incremental overhead after the first user subscribes to any given community. So if you have an instance containing people with many different interests/subscriptions, the server is going to be working much harder than an instance where most users are subscribed to the same limited set of communities. Unfortunately for us, I expect this instance to fall into the former category, which is probably contributing to the storage bloat.
Obviously we just have to make it work on this instance, we're already in too deep. But going forward, those who wish to create an instance of their own or create another account on a different instance should keep in mind that servers where the users have overlapping subscriptions can theoretically be run much more cheaply and efficiently.
On another note, I tried to post this response as a reply to @lifeishard and it just would not go through. Had to reply to the top level comment. Not sure why.
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.
I can attest that my selection process went a little like this: "Lemmy.ml is overloaded, I should pick a different instance. sh.itjust.works... ok you got me. I'm in."
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. :)
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.
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)
Yes, we'd like more information on this please. I chose this instance from this list partly because of the name, and partly because of the lack of restrictions, it was marked as "adult" in the list.
Does no NSFW mean that we can't view anything NSFW with an account on this instance? Does it mean just porn, or anything considered NSFW (if Lemmy makes that distinction, I'm not sure)? Essentially, what does it mean in terms of restrictions?
I'd like to know too, the way this is worded makes me believe that we will not be federated with NSFW instances. I hope the admin reconsiders this decision
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.
Haha. Seems to take me to the top post. But I hadn’t really played around with that aspect yet. I’m still trying to find some established communities that fit my interests.
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?
My understanding is that each instance has its own selection of content it allows to be hosted by that instance. But your username/password can log into any instance, and access that content. When you do this, the content is not transfered to the instance your UN/PW is from (your origin), but access to that content is granted as you have a federated log-in.
What is brought to the origin instance is like a pin in a map that can then be seen by the origin server, and added to the origins directory for other users on the origin to see. Each instance has its own directory based on the pins that instances users have placed throughout the internet/fediverse.
Back to your question, and this is my understanding of how it works. You won't find any NSFW communities hosted on sh.itjust.works, but you can see & access nsfw communities from others (lem.my, lemme.one etc...) using your sh.it login. I think you as a user will be able to add NSFW to your feed, but it won't be on the directory for others to find if the admins blacklisted that content/community.
This is my first post on any of the fediverse, and I am partly posting this to see if I am way off base, so please correct me!
I don't your personal account will get in trouble for subbing to rule breaking communities, but if the instance hosting those communities is blocked by this one you won't be able to see those posts anymore.
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.
Exactly the same here man, come October I'd have been on reddit daily for 10 years, but alas. Something will come along, and I'm willing to try and see if Lemmy is it despite initial concerns
Problem I see here is for instance, I searched for Plex, and there's two communities on different servers. So that leads to questions like which one should I subscribe to? What if more keep popping up? Etc. I think this is going to be an issue with federation and everyone being able to operate in their own little universe. I think there should have been some kind of check where if you want to make your community public, it would have to be uniquely named across the federated universe (not including the server name).
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 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.
That rule does need some clarification. My guess is that sh.itjust.works isn't involved if you, as a user, subscribe to a community on say porn.lemmy.pt. If you post porn there though, maybe it would be? I'm not sure.
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!
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.
I'm on the mobile browser version, but click your profile picture, settings, and then go to the blocked tab. Should be a blocked communities subheading. Let me know if that works.
The only ones I see are either for furries or loli/shota (aka paedo hentai). Ew.
Hopefully with time some more vanilla stuff springs up. I think the decentralized aspect lends itself to this, but it does mean it will be harder to discover.
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).
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.
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.
Some of the more niche communities might not exist right now, or might be pretty dead right now. As this is still growing, splitting a smaller community like "indiegaming" off of an already relatively small "gaming" focused community might not make too much sense yet, but you're always free to create a community you feel is missing!
You can search for communities that are either local to this instances, or who local members here have already searched for, using the Communities link at the top of the page.
If you don't find a community there, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist!
You can search for all communities across all lemmy instances with the Lemmy Community-Browser.
When you find a community you'd like to subscribe to via the Community-Browser, don't follow the link directly.
Click on 'Communities' at the top of your page.
In the search bar, enter the full community url, i.e. https://lemmy.ca/c/pcgaming.
Click 'Search'. Most likely nothing will happen immediately.
When you clicked Search, your instance started fetching posts from the pcgaming community on the lemmy[.]ca instance and storing it on your sh.itjust[.]works instance. Give it a second, then click search again. You should now see the community in the results.
Click it, and you'll go to the community through your instance, keeping you logged in and able to subscribe and all that stuff.
This process only has to happen if you're the first person on your instance to search for that particular community.
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).
well, if you want to feed the current drama and reach those folks, you can always follow these instructions to delete your existing comments and posts, and replace them with a description on how to do the same:
Hey! This is something I am paying close attention at the moment. I plan on making a post that I'll periodically update sharing these details with everyone. For now there this post that I'll be updating before tomorrow with the latest graphs!
Now this is an example of one part I cant seem to figure out lol.
I click that link and I leave sh.itjust.works and end up on lemmy.ml. And then I cant comment.
But I do already know that I can go to that community thru sh.itjustworks, find that post, and then Id be able to comment. Feels like Im missing something.
(and extra confusing in this particular instance: that post was made by a sh.itjust.works account and yet I still cant comment.)
Firstly to clarify, that link goes to lemmy.world.
No, you're not missing anything, it's confusing. I don't actually know how to link communities in a way that they will be automatically opened through the person's home instance, assuming that the home instance is subscribed, but I believe it is possible to do so. And if it isn't possible now I believe it can be made possible.
However, in this case it's easy because we are both from sh.itjust.works, so I can link you to our own instance's copy.
Or you can use a link like the one below to go to the version of any community that's hosted on your home instance. But if none of our users are subscribed to the community it won't exist here.
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.
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.
Could always post a link to images/video through an IPFS gateway I guess, although idk if the browser extension automatically fetches those through IPFS or just uses the gateway.
You'd need people willing to host the data at scale. IPFS is just a transport. Need some kind of effort to get everyone to run the client and make pinning things easier. Without changes it'd explode all the current hosting options.
I'm completely new. (Reddffugee)I would much rather contribute to a subscription/donation service than ad-supported. It would be great to see the estimated cost per user in a semi-real-time basis, and a goal for quantity of monthly fixed-cost subs. I'd happily pay a $5/mo sub, for example.
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?
That community will now always have the latest posts, comments and vote totals pulled in as soon as the other instance publishes them
EDIT: Should probably mention that as soon as Kbin sorts our their technical difficulties, then you can use this exact approach to pull in Kbin magazines (https://kbin.social/m/cs, for example)
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 😅
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.
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?
That community will now always have the latest posts, comments and vote totals pulled in as soon as the other instance publishes them
EDIT: Should probably mention that as soon as Kbin sorts our their technical difficulties, then you can use this exact approach to pull in Kbin magazines (https://kbin.social/m/cs, for example)
It's the former, if we're not federated with them you can't subscribe. Afaik lemmygrad.ml is the only major instance we aren't federated with, and they're a server that supports the CCP and authoritarian communism. If you want to view that content, you can try making an account over there but they'll prob reject you
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!
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?
Hey there! I'm a Jerboa user and I thought the same as well. Since there's a drop-down list, I assumed you had to be a part of one of those instances to use the app.
However, after clicking the drop down menu, you can just type the blank space at the very top of the list and manually type in an instance. I am a lemmy.world user currently logged in and posting with Jerboa!
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?
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?
I believe it's the former. Your instance proactively downloads from all its subscriptions so that when you go to look at them, they're already there on your server.
How is that going to work with illegal content? If you host an instance that doesn’t allow certain content due to legal / moral reasons but a user on your instance subscribed to it on a different instance, does it end up on your instance anyway?
This seems like it could be a problem.
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.
Welcome! Which ever instance you sign up becomes your home instance. You can browse other instances through your home instance however when it comes signing in, you need to do it from your home instance. I will add some “getting started” material in the future to help answer questions like these as I know you’re definitely not the only one we these type of questions.
Your account is hosted by this instance so that's where you have to log in. But from here you can subscribe and participate in communities hosted by (almost) all other lemmy instances.
Hey just joined as a reddit refuge. Been following the fediverse programs for a while, so I'm excited to join! On reddit I was fairly active on the credit card rewards subs and I am interested in starting a community here as well but that seems like it might not get a lot of interest here.
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!
I love the custom themes idea! I’ve been spending most of my time ensuring the stability and scalability of this instance. I haven’t had a chance to review the lemmy documentation related to theming/styling. I’d love to see something custom but would have to rely on the community as styling is not one of my strengths. Would be fun to open up a competition and have everyone vote their favorite!
I'm using Jerboa on Android right now and it's working fine. The equivalent iOS app would be Mlem. All taken from this page: https://join-lemmy.org/apps/
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. 😄
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! 🏴
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!
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
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.
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.