Ive searched everywhere for an Arab/middle eastern instance, and the only one I could find was a fucking Turkish one (that I think is dead too lmao). I'd do it my self but L + no money + too lazy
Hosting your own instance starts off with paying out of pocket then once you set up donations from the community those dollars would fund most of the operating costs. However as the instance gets larger the economies of scale improve and eventually you may have some money leftover to put aside. You could also sell merch of the logos like stickers to help with keeping the lights on.
A lemmy instance needs a domain name, a host and a smtp email for notifications.
I wonder what the Lemmy.world server operations are like.
Are we talking "nations that have an official Lemmy instance" or "nations in which some private citizen or resident just happens to host a Lemmy instance?"
This seems to be missing Mali, the home of .ml. It's in West Africa and since the French soldiers left it's been an authoritarian client state of Russia. Very appropriate.
True, but it still gives the Malian government an ultimate authority over the domain, which just seems completely dumb to me. The also-semi-failed Libya has ultimate authority over ly domains (like bit.ly) and has actually used its power to shut down domains for being against Libyan law. Domain hacks are not just ugly, they're dumb.
I'm surprised Lemmy apparently has had hardly any penetration into the Spanish-speaking world yet. Is there some other Reddit-like service that's popular with those folks?
Also a long those lines, I wonder what services the Indians and Chinese are using?
Chinese gotta use state-approved and controlled mainstream apps and media, or access foreign stuff via VPN. Homegrown, off the grid stuff like Lemmy only gets by as long as it’s obscure.
If it’s big enough and ornery (includes political content, rather than say just all cooking recipes and form) it’s liable to be blocked.
Can somebody also make join-lemmy.org notice that our instance exists? Can't get it listed, even though we comply with the requirements for a while now.
I think there's like 12 countries that still claim to be communist. Cuba, China and Russia off the top of my head and there's a handful of island nations that are doing quite well with it
Oh, I thought their server was located in a different country. It's a bad idea to have a server in a location that the US government has authority over.
In Japan, there is no culture similar to Reddit in the first place, so Lemmy has not been widely accepted, and there are very few users. I tried promoting it before, but it had no effect. Similarly, Mastodon groups are rarely used except for a few cases. Even if you come across Japanese users elsewhere, most of them can speak English and have used Reddit in the past.
Moreover, as is the case for me, most Japanese people do not understand any language other than Japanese—not even English. Because of this, even if they connect with other global servers, they cannot communicate due to language and cultural differences, which I believe has led to this situation.
I was just going to ask what the Irish instance was. I'd correct that asap as they can get awfully feisty when riled. I've got ¾ Irish ancestry, so it's not racist.
Thanks for doing that! It'd be helpful to have it in list form too, so we can help point people to instances based on location should they be interested:)
seriously speaking, how much work is to host an instance actually? Besides buying the domain and getting it up and running on some cloud/homelab? The are any security concerns or maintenance that would take a lot of my time? Do I need to put some effort in instance level moderation, or that comes from communities? How many resources/hardware an instance uses per user?
Setting up is easy, but keeping it up to date is often troublesome. Releases are far and few between and as such, whenever there is one, it includes a lot of changes. That leads to some instances having trouble pretty much every time; I've been on the unlucky side enough times to be wary.
Lemmy.cafe runs on 2 dual vcore 4gb ram VMs on digitalocean - one for db, another for lemmy itself.
Lemmy prides itself in being written in rust, but it leaks memory like a sieve - I've had split up the containers into smaller tasks (there's an official flag you can pass to it), double them up and set memory limits. That way when something gets killed by the kernel it's not really noticable to the end user.
Running a public instance of anything is a security concern, let alone alpha-beta software like lemmy. If you do run it on your homelab at home - at least get the cheapest vm in the cloud to hide your home IPs. You'd probably need to set up a wireguard tunnel to ensure outgoing federation does not reveal the IPs to other instances.
Instance level moderation is up to you. Don't be too dreamy - nobody will join your instance just because you have it running. Other than spammers and voting bots, that is. Moderation tools are just not there, so you'll have to fiddle in the db directly.
Having said all that - if all you want is a personal inatance - go for it! With sign ups disabled it's a much less stressful experience!
I want one for my country, and I want to validate that users are in fact people from my country. Once inside, they can do pretty much whatever they want. We aren't going to be a lot of people at the start for sure. What would you recommend me?
I don't know from experience, but I've seen mentions of it taking serious work, including dealing with CP content being uploaded (federated?) to random instances...
If you don't want to spend too much time with moderation, you will have to manually approve registrations, simply to avoid spam. Sure, that increases the workload slightly, as you're gonna have to go through applications let's say once a week, but you don't have to monitor the instance 24/7. I would still recommend checking reports once in a while, just to be on the safe side. But definitely make sure to deploy @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com's fedi-safety to prevent CSAM from being uploaded on your instance.
If you have the technical know-how it isn't too bad. Equally, moderation and accepting accounts shouldn't be too much hassle. There are other Admins and devs on Matrix who will lend advice if you need it.
What you need to do is to invest a bit of time into planning to make the instance sustainable, especially as you are planning on running an instance for your country.
Get at least one more Admin onboard, so there is some redundancy.
Accept donations - Open Collective is very good for this as you you can use a fiscal host who will hold the money for you. When you hit a critical mass the donations should cover expenses and scale well as your user numbers grow.
Plan contingencies for if you are too busy to oversee the site or you don't want to do it any more, don't just drop off the radar.
I say, go for it and if you need any help then there are a lot of people around who are more than happy to do what they can.
There used to be Lemmy Indonesia as well.
Just like almost all Indonesian fediverse instance, all of them are dead (except Misskey and that new Mastodon instance barren of any user).
Would be kinda cool to have some more African and south+east Asian instances. I would happily donate to help get some instances hosted in poorer countries.
It's not a bad idea with the push to end sectoon 230 by Chuck Schumer on behalf of the entertainment industry. Copyright trolls would come crawling out of the woodwork and sue the owner. Meta would weaponize it by intentionally posting infringing and other illegal content in order to shut down competition.
This is where the machine is hosted?
I am thinking about the domain they used might be a different one.
Example I would take where it is cheapest to host it.
I'm more interested in distribution of users and local-focus of communities than country-based instances, nevertheless the map does illustrate that Lemmy has huge gaps - no country instance in all of Africa, hardly any in Asia... What can we do to make it a more global conversation ?