I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.
Have you considered it’s because of this?:
My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
I wouldn’t run an instance that didn’t allow users to sign up as it would impede growth and uptake.
It also would have the interesting effect of pushing a lot of the load onto other instances, which doesn’t seem true to the Fediverse spirit.
Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.
ITT: People who don’t understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won’t de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
lol I think you are right about this. You’ll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.
there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
On the other hand, for some communities moderation of the communities and the members are specific and should not be generalized.
Beehaw is an example that comes to mind, lemmy.ml as well
Even though the community is contained the cloud resources should still be split in two between identity and operations to be in alignment with all the industry best practices and potential for scalability. Remember the unix philosophy is do one thing well.
Beehaw should operate their own Beehaw fediverse IDP (Identity provider) for the users to sign in with, that would manage their tos agreements, privacy policies and user based security. Separately they should operate their Lemmy server which hosts pictures and links organized by communities. They could just use a single IDP for their instance and have the same experience as now only better with better architecture.
Source: I am a cloud services architect.
I’m familiar with IAM concepts, and indeed having a separate IdP and content instances would be a better architecture.
However the reality is that the platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed) are being developed by very small teams (Piefed is a 2 or 3 people team, and Lemmy might be around 5).
Lemmy is focusing on features delivery (https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy), which could help the platform grow more than a new IAM architecture.
There will probably be a point in time where performance will require a rework, but at the moment, it does not seem to be a priority
But nothing needs to be done to meet this OPs desires for community only instances that are well federated with other instances (IE at least one user is subscribed to each community on each instance). This way those admins just manage those communities and Beehaw and Lemmy.ml can run their combined servers.
The users and the subscribed to communities cause nearly all the load on the servers too, it is a way to keep costs down.
Who would manage all of those community instances?
The current setup works well with the limited number of admins and mods we have overall. I’m regularly looking for mods on communities I mod, there isn’t so many of them (e.g. [email protected] )
Also, with the federation currently being broken, mods would need to have an account on each community to be able to get the reports: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4744
Regarding costs, the cost of these community instances suggested by OP is around 6500€ per year, so 540€ per month (https://lemmy.world/comment/12595221)
It currently costs 80€ per month to host lemmy.ml, which is the 4th most active instance with 2300 monthly active users
I mean that is what is is asking, he is looking for a team of people to manage the instances in this post. That is what this post is about, he is looking for a team of people to run them as admins while maintaining his (imo correct) vision for how it should be structured.
I forgot to mention the biggest fact- the users are where all the risk are. If people are just posting pictures to your instance of communities you have minimized risk as you can just gatekeep what is posted. Once you allow users in who can then post on other federated communities you take on a lot more risk.
Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different
/c/Technologycommunities across instances.It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.
Multi communities have been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Excellent! Thanks. Ill take a look at it sometime. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
Last time I checked, there was still discussion on how people want this to work. Because its easy to say, but hard to get everyone to agree.
That’s an argument that is:
- application specific
- agency-removing (only Lemmy devs can do something about)
- orthogonal to the stated problem
Yeah I remember asking about it cause it was a feature that existed on Kbin https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/486
I even created a dedicated thread on [email protected]:
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/426059/Feature-tracking-Multicommunities-multimagazines#comments
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn’t it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn’t it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
Reports are still not federated
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven’t had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating “community instances” from “people instances”:
- Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a “too big to fail” scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
- Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn’t want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.
Yes, I haven’t had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
Reports still do not federate, that’s the main issue with federated moderation
Pinning threads is buggy across instances.
Also
I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.
And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it’ll take way too many communities with it.
If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would [email protected] be interested in moving to
!football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like [email protected] is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like [email protected] - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would [email protected] be interested in moving to
!football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?I’m not the main mod of [email protected] so it’s really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.
moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
Sounds silly indeed, but I agree (https://feddit.org/comment/2048090 )
I had a feeling that would be an issue!
On the one hand, football@soccer would be a good compromise.
On the other, we’re right, the Americans are wrong. Simple as that. So I sympathise with the lack of willingness to compromise on the matter.
Americans are wrong
Don’t forget Australia, NZ, S Africa, and a few other places like Japan.
How accurate is this map? If the Irish call football soccer, it would be most shocking thing I’ve learnt in 2024.
Just checked, they call it football. Like everyone with half a braincell.
I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users’ All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.
If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.
I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven’t pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?
Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.
Third is that different communities have different needs.
New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.
I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.
Why?
That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That’s also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don’t like that very much.
From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.
Now it makes even less sense.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don’t allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There’s still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don’t see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what’s the point? It doesn’t improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you’d need a way to… federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there’s no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.
Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it’s just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don’t need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.
But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?
I can’t even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.
If you want communities to be resistant to server removal
Another non-sequitur.
So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy
How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?
In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy
Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?
Ah, sorry if that wasn’t clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.
A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.
I mentioned that basically because I feel that’s a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, not my primary language.
A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more.
This is not federation anymore, but an entirely different architecture. Nostr works like this, but it also has its flaws.
It seems kind of slimy.
If you don’t want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.
It’s amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing “you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?”, even though I’m running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of “community-based instances” .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
I’m skeptical about this since you are squatting on at least 18 urls while trying to get volunteers to create value out of them. Nothing leads me to assume you are being altruistic.
Edit: misattributed something, woops
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize and trying to hold the most potential instances without putting any work or money into it. It’s just my impression.
I also think instances without users are a terrible idea and I’d rather real instances come about organically instead created by people that actually care about the subject.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I’m not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don’t mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we’d have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is starting now to be shared by other prominent figures in the Fediverse.
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I’d hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
Thank you for providing the numbers, these domains are quite pricey if you have to pay 1700 € per year on domains alone.
I don’t run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.
I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?
Closed for registrations = no instance user accounts
