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  • That's the best part, it doesn't!

    You're spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it out of the goodness of their heart for various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, lust for gold, being born with a heart full of neutrality, etc).

    My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it's a good idea to run your own server.

    • I've been thinking of hosting my own instance for myself, but I was wondering if you'd noticed any oddities! I've heard of some bugs that occur when interacting cross-instance. Also stuff about content being out of sync, which I notice currently with lemmy.ml from my current instance (lemmy.world).

      • I can't say I have, but I basically only browse from my instance, so I may very well be missing out on things I could see on the instance the community is based on. I have noticed that .world and .ml are usually very slow to return results for my searches (as well as some other large instances like sh.it-just.works), and I have had trouble getting them to acknowledge my subscription (retrying a few times over a few hours or days works). I think this is basically because they are still overloaded, at least periodically. If .ml is slow to federate because it has lots of federation work to do and .world is failing to accept requests due to load that sounds like a recipe for sending of posts, comments, votes, etc. to have to retry over a period of minutes or hours, if at all.

        If you are running your own instance it would marginally increase the federation load on e.g. .ml in the example above, but since the server you run isn't overloaded you would most likely see things on your instance after .ml's first attempt to send you the post/comment/vote/whatever. The ideal would be lots of medium sized instances that can handle the load so that there isn't too much federation work to do (having only one user per instance would mean servers need to federate to thousands or even millions of servers, which would be a lot of work and bandwidth), but at the same time no single server would be too overload to handle the incoming messages either.

    • Also, where can I start my own server for funsies? Ive got trueNAS, unsure if I can run it from there.

      • I probably can't help much when it comes to TrueNAS, all of my experience is running it on Docker in Linux. AFAIK there is no plugin/jail for it out of the box, the easiest would probably to run a Linux VM on it and follow one of the official lemmy install guides using either Ansible or Docker (compose). I am sure you could figure out a way to install it from scratch in a jail, but that is beyond my experience with BSD.

        In addition to the setup of the server itself you'll want a domain, DNS, SSL and to figure out port forwarding (assuming your TrueNAS box is at home) at a bare minimum. Someone asked a similar question earlier and you can read a slightly longer response for these things in my response to them in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml. I also suggest there that a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode would probably be more reliable and easier for some things and could be done (in a way that supports at least a small instance) on a budget of <$10/mo.

        If you have any questions or want a more opinionated answer as to how I would set it up let me know.

    • Sooo… what happened in Beehaw?

      • Most of the why it is explained quite well in the instance's sidebar:

        We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users. Websites with ineffective moderation allow hate speech to proliferate and contribute to the erosion of minority rights and safe spaces. Our goal with Beehaw is to demonstrate and promote a healthier environment.

        Beehaw's approach involves a fairly aggressive content curation policy for their instance. This includes defederating instances (which they have done 387 times so far). If you agree with their philosophy this isn't a problem and is probably welcome vs a more laissez-faire attitude some instances have. They are also still very open compared to instances like Hexbear which runs Lemmy but has federation off (it looks like they are considering opening to some degree up at some point). They give two reasons for defederation in their docs:

        First, if your instance houses or has a vast array of users that engage in hate speech, it gets added to that list:

        We are simple with defederating: we do not allow hate speech, and we must consider our own limits when it comes to moderating. If an instance allows hateful speech or in our judgement has users who are too much for us to currently manage given the state of Lemmy, we defederate with it.

        Second, some large instances (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works) have been defederated because the burden on the admins and mods given current (incredibly primitive) tooling within Lemmy for moderation is too great even though the instance as a whole is not generally in violation of their hate speech policy. This is also a reaction to issues beyond the hate speech policy such as how users engage in the communities hosted on beehaw

        The choice to defederate from an instance can also be based on our inability to effectively moderate that instance’s users. As of now, only two of our defederations are on this basis (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works), and we hope to eventually refederate with both of them.

        Finally, under the "inability to effectively moderate" justification they've preemptively defederated from instances that (likely mistakenly) had open sign ups and have had massive (likely bot) user growth. It seems they haven't updated their docs to reflect this decision yet, though.

        Given their philosophy I think this approach makes sense, but I absolutely understand why this pisses off some people who want more of a free-speech/wild-west in the fediverse. While someone may be free to speak everyone else is free to not listen. You have no obligation to engage with those you disagree with, as much as those people may want you to.

        Hope this helps.

  • since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?

    • Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.

      Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.

      If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.

      One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).

      In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.

      So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.

    • the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom

      It's their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more power over users, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.

  • The world's most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it's certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.

  • A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.

    The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I'd imagine largely pro bono.

    • I think lemmy.ml was getting money from NLnet by completing Milestones, but now that they're scrambling to handle bugs and doing Q&A constantly I think they're losing out on that funding. At least that's what Dessalines reported, I believe

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