Currently, on the main instance, people have created 40191 accounts (+214 marked as deleted). I don’t know how many are active because I don’t monitor it, but once again, I greet all of you here :) In recent days, the traffic on the website has been overwhelming. It’s definitely too much for the basic docker-compose setup, primarily designed for development use. I was aware of the possible consequences of the situation happening on Reddit, but I assumed that most people would migrate to one of the Lemmy instances, which already has an established position. I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin ;)
The first step was to upscale the VPS to a higher version (66.91EUR). It quickly turned out that it wasn’t enough. I had to enable CF protection just to keep the website responsive, but the response times were still very slow. At this stage, the instance was practically unusable. The next step was a full migration to a dedicated server (100EUR, the current hardware). It can be done relatively quickly, so it resulted in a 5-minute technical break. Despite the much higher parameters, it didn’t get any better. It became clear that the problem didn’t lie there. I’m really frustrated when it comes to server administration. That was the moment when I started looking for help. Or rather, it found me.
A couple days ago I wrote about how kbin qualified for the Fast Forward program. To be honest, I did it out of pure curiosity and completely forgot because a lot was happening during that time. During the biggest fire incident, Hannah ( @haubles ) reached out with a proposal to help. I outlined the situation (in short: the server is dying, I don’t even know what I need, help! ;). She quickly connected us with Vlad ( @vvuksan ) and Renaud ( @renchap ). I was probably too tired because I don’t know if the whole operation lasted 60 minutes or 6 hours, but after a series of precise questions and getting an understanding of the situation, the guys themselves adjusted the entire job. I love working with experts, and it’s not often that you come across individuals so well-versed in the fediverse. Thanks to Hannah’s kindness, we will be staying there a bit longer. Currently, fastly.com handles the caching layer and processes images. Hence those cool moving thumbnails ;)
Things were going well at that point. I could disable Cloudflare protection. Probably thanks to that, many of you are here today, and we got to know each other a bit better :) However, even then, when I tried to enable federation, the server would stop working.
Around the same time, Piotr ( @piotrsikora ), whom I already knew from the Polish fediverse, contacted me. He is the administrator of the Polish Mastodon instance pol.social, operates within the ftdl.pl foundation, and specializes in administering applications with a very similar tech stack. I made the decision to grant him server access. It only took him a few moments, and he came back to me with a few tips that allowed us to enable federation. In the following days, there was more of it, and we managed to reach the current level. I think it’s not too bad.
Nevertheless, managing the instance has taken up about 60% or more of my time so far, which prevents me from fully focusing on current tasks. That’s why I would like to collaborate with Piotr and hand over full care of the server to him. Piotr will also take care of the security side. Now I have to take this much more seriously. We still need to work out the terms of cooperation, but I want you to know the direction I intend to pursue.
We also need to migrate to a new environment because one server will sooner or later become insufficient. This time, I want to be prepared for it. This may be associated with transient issues with the website in the coming days.
The next two updates will still be about project funding (I still can’t believe what happened) and moderation. The following ones will be more technical, with descriptions of changes and what contributors are doing on Codeberg. I would like to be here more often, but not as an admin, just as myself.
Thank you all for this.
P.S. In private messages, I also received numerous offers of help that I didn’t even have a chance to read and respond to. You are the best!
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Infrastructure costs money. Communities need to remove bad actors. These are just facts of life.
Communities require continual investment. This is as true online, as it is for in-person communities, so it’s important for people to donate when and if they can, if they find value in a community. The key thing is, a community needing to be invested in is very different from needing, or wanting, to turn a profit. In fact, community and profit-seeking are kind of mutually exclusive.
The profit motive inevitably strangles the community.
There are no free lunches. You want a nice platform? You’ve gotta pay for it somehow. You want a platform not filled with spam? You gotta keep it clean somehow. Funding and moderation. I really hope that kbin can survive off of donations, and I have already financially contributed fairly heavily in pursuit of that. Ernest is doing the right thing by communicating about these issues early, and often. Part of why Reddit got so fucked up was that there was no community engagement when it came to raising money. That’s the nature of all for-profit platforms IMO.
This is where federated, FOSS platforms can do better.
Same song, new instruments, that’s all. Just brace for the ads and the monetization. Be ready to be a customer rather than a user, or be ready to move on.
Do you think Ernest should run and develop this whole site out of his personal income?
The Fediverse needs to get a handle on advertising and revenue, and what’s considered acceptable and not acceptable. It’s easier to do this now than after a bunch of bad actors have shown up and ruined things. My initial idea: a standard API that provides the contract between the service and its users. It would include things such as how, where and when advertising is used in that instance, whether you can opt-out, and how to do so, operating costs, revenue sources and relative amounts, etc. This API could be leveraged to aggregate lists of instances that end users could then sort and filter to find those that meet with their individual values. It could also become part of the standard UI so that users could easily locate where to support the operator of various instances, instead of relying on posting messages and hoping somebody knows where to donate (and that they are providing the true information).
Yes, I do realize there’s a bit of a “herding cats” aspect to this. And there are those who are just completely opposed to any sort of “monetization” at all, but to me that’s just an argument in favour of making it as transparent and discoverable as possible.
This is a slippery slope. Reddit used to be open-source…
First, just because reddit fucked it up doesn’t mean that’s the only path forward.
Second, if the Fediverse community doesn’t address advertising, somebody will. Probably somebody with deep pockets, and it won’t be in the way anyone other than the advertisers wants it. Sure you can defederate them, but that’s most likely going to result in a fragmented Fediverse with 95% of the users in a corporate walled-garden and 5% of users in a free (however you want to define "free) but content-poor open world.
I’m not suggesting that advertising should be pushed between instances. Quite the opposite: advertising (if allowed) would be up to the individual instance to decide if, when and how users of that instance (i.e. those that are browsing that instance using that instance’s UI/application/website) would see advertising. Don’t like ads? Sign up with a different instance. The API I’ve suggested is not for publishing ads. It’s purely informational to enforce transparency about how/where the funds to run an instance come from, and, if you so desire, tell you the official way to directly provide financial support. That information could also be used when subscribing across instances, to warn of potential bias, or about their advertising policies if you decide to visit directly. I’m basically suggesting a way to encode the suggestions in https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/fediverse-could-be-awesome-if-we-dont-screw-it, point #6 in a machine-readable way.
Hundreds of thousands of people on Fedi are yet to be convinced to this. Your opinion is unpopular, and any try do combine fedi with funding by advertisements could likely break the fediverse rather than make it more sustainable.
Upvoted your comments inter alia for courage.
I’m not sure what “opinion” you are referring to. I’m not advocating that I want advertising or commercial entities running the majority of the Fediverse instances. Or is it my suggestion that it’s possible to avoid that fate, even while suggesting that it’s inevitable that advertising will eventually arrive?
Really my main point was we need to have some way of ensuring that instances are able to pay their operating costs. At least until unicorn farts and rainbows are accepted in exchange for hosting, bandwidth and technical services.
You know, I’m honestly not very concerned about that. As long as it’s not money or energy I have to expend, I’m fine with whatever needs to happen, including the ‘move on’ option.
I receive support from the people here, and I also want to clearly communicate and report expenses. I feel a sense of responsibility. Many magazines have been abandoned, and that also needs to be addressed.
I have some magazines already. Just saying, I will take care of it and contribute a lot. But better moderation tools are soon needed. I can’t even delete someone’s posts in my magazines. I feel useless :v. I contribute a lot to lemmynsfw.com as of now
post > more >moderate > delete?
It only throws to the error page. It’s not fixed yet, I guess. Even marked as NSFW didn’t work anymore.
Edit: I can delete thread now
D:
I’ve only ever deleted my own posts, so i assumed it was in working order. If that’s the current case, I may rethink how much I’ve been wanting subscribers. That’s a recipe for disaster atm
I’ve said it before — I’m not sure if you have it roadmapped, but I’d be really happy to contribute $5-25 on a monthly basis using Patreon/Open Collective to help pay for ongoing development and infrastructure costs. I really love what you’ve built here, and I’m super excited to see where it will go.
I tried with Open Collective, but my application was rejected. I will try again at some point in the future.
Drat! That’s super disappointing. I don’t know why they rejected your application, since you seem like their target demographic (FOSS developer running a community-funded alternative to a proprietary platform). Some gentle community outreach might get them to reconsider, but I’d also be worried about people being jerks.
Well, it’s monthly coffees for now! I’ll make sure I have something in my calendar.
Liberapay could be another alternative, lemmy is set up there as well.
I would also like a subscription type of donation like badabinski suggested. Preferably in EUR.
Don’t listen to the naysayers. The vast majority of us are appreciative of what you’re doing here, and thankful for the work you’ve done so far. 600+ donations to back that up! We’re happy to help contribute specifically because we’re not the product.
Or spin up your own instance. Pay the $6/month it’ll cost you, and never worry about ads and admins exploiting you for profit. You always have an out here.
Plus, it’s not actually that expensive. Centralized services have a problem because not only do they need to cover hosting costs, but also development costs, moderating costs, and then they need to answer to shareholders and provide a return on investment. Here, everything’s being done by volunteers. Development, hosting, etc. None of it is being done for profit, by businesses.
Look at it this way. If there are, say, 30k active users on the server, and hosting costs are 100 Eur/month, then it just takes 20 people donating 5 Eur/month to keep things going. And if every server has similar costs and similar benefactors, then this space is golden.
Costs, of course, will be higher over time, but there are ways to share them. Media sharing is already a thing, and if more media shares crop up, costs can be kept pretty low and people with resources and a love of community can keep things going indefinitely.
You just have to trust a small fraction of users to actually support not being the product.
Yeah, don’t even get me started about all the ads on Wikipedia. /s Servers cost money. Money has to come from somewhere, that doesn’t mean ad dollars, but likely donations/grants. Moderation is a given for any public space because people could start posting CP, and I don’t think anyone wants that.