Hello everyone!
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!
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I’m with Tendie. If storage is the problem, I’m happy to spend an extra 3 clicks uploading to Imgur.
EDIT: Oh… But there’s also all the images on all the communities we visit being downloaded. That’s not an avoidable issue.
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.
Thanks et merci! I’m happy to call sh.itjust.works my new home 🎉
I’ll second that 🍻
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.
Thank you!
Lol. At the time of writing this, sh.itjust.works doubled again to 2k users.
This shit be cray-cray yo.
That probably comes down to the great name!
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.”
I was having problems with getting acceptance to other instances. I would apply, but it wouldn’t let me in the app. So by the time I went back to check I couldn’t find it again. I saw this instance name and was like Hmm… I wonder if it will just work… and shit… it did!
That was exactly my thought process.
And also the point of this comment was to see if I was smart enough to figure out a new platform…
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.
This is the only instance that instantly let me sign up.
Other instances sign up button at the end kept spinning and spinning forever to sign up lol. I got frustrated and gave up .
Same here. A lot of lemmy instances are struggling with all the new people from reddit I think lol.
Most of the ones I tried just timed out on hitting sign up
Same. Idk how other people are getting into lemmy.ml or beehaw but that shit iced me out multiple times.
Yeah i was going to give up lol.
Name checks out ;)
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. :)
Lmao. You are right though. We need to be able to make fun of everyone, ourselves included. We will just need to be polite about it for now :)
And btw if you see that thanks for having us Dude!
J’espère que tout le monde aura beaucoup de plaisir!
tabarnak !
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)
Or just that we can not host them here?
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
1000 users already? Thats bonkers.
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.
Hi everyone. Reddit refugee here. I’m not tech-savvy so I’m posting because I’m a noob and testing this out.
Heck, same. The narwhal bacons at midnight etc.
Any idea what the rainbow pentagram thing is next to the permalink button above comments?
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.
Oh so it does. That doesn’t seem worth a button!
What’s up! Also a refugee. Hopefully this thing takes off, digging the vibes here. Less of a learning curve than I thought.
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
Yeah, I found that once you get through the “how to find communities” part, it becomes a breeze to use
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).
A unique name could work. I think the fragmentation is an intended feature, though. If it turns out the admins or members of lemmy.foo/c/stuff are buttholes you can easily switch to lemmy.baz/c/stuff.
As a Reddffugee I have the same challenge.
That’s a good point. I think this is just going to take some getting used to, and will be good in the long run. To comment on my Plex scenario, I went ahead and just subscribed to both.
Cheers. Let me know if you come up with more tips!
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.
Can we see what subs are blocked by this instance?
Someone was passing around a link to a list, I don’t remember what it was but I think we’re only blocking lemmygrad.ml (tanky instance)
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.
Thanks again!
