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!
I have no idea what I’m doing, or how this works, but I’m very excited to be here!
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.
Joined today :). Seems like a really chill instance which I would expect from someone called The Dude
Oh shi—
It’s Tom
Yes, it is me – MySpace Tom! I am going to create a federated MySpace and bring emo back, babyyyy
Same here Just checking out ouh
Test And an image
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 😅
How much storage are we talking about? I could provide a server to host all the files for this instance (ofc if the amount of data isnt in petabytes).
If storage may become a problem, should users upload elsewhere and put links?
It definitely helps!
Reposting an earlier comment here for better visibility to help educate newcomers.
I had no idea how this whole fediverse thing worked until I read this comment. https://lemmy.world/comment/20357
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.)
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.
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
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?
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)
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!
Such a nice and warm welcome, thank you for maintaining the server.
Thanks et merci! I’m happy to call sh.itjust.works my new home 🎉
I’ll second that 🍻
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.
I agree. I think we are going to create a really cool community here and I’m also happy to help.
+1! I joined for the 99% renewable energy tagline, we love to be sustainable.
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?
