lemmy.ca

Dunno. Hey @smorks@smorks@lemmy.ca , what is lemmy.ca’s host provider/plan (unless its top secret Canadian Moose Power Secrets)?

[meta]

• where do I go with questions?
• is there a community search engine? Y: https://browse.feddit.de/
• is there a community listing? Y: each instance has one of course, “Communities” at the top, but !lemmy411@lemmy.ca is trying to compile one and has it stickied.
• is there a list of instances?
• how do I find my instances admin?
• how do I find a communities moderators?

• why can my instance sometimes not find a community that I know exists (if you look at its home instance)?
• [federation] how can I follow a Lemmy community from <other fediverse platform> and what will that look like? can I respond from <other>, what does THAT look like on Lemmy and vice versa?
• [federation] can I search/follow users/hashtags in other fediverse platforms on Lemmy?

As everyone else has already said that’s a very good question, one that doesn’t necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I’d point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn’t unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we’ve had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster’s expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like “federated” instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone’s data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn’t abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I’d guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren’t people donating to open source projects… and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

… and be sure to post it to !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca !

Whups. try now.

For what its worth I just spend this morning scraping a list of communities from the dozen largest Lemmy instances. ANd last night for no good reason other than it existed in Reddit, I created !lemmy411@lemmy.ca

Today’s Lemmyverse Community Listing: https://lemmy.ca/post/612259

Naw, because sometimes it works and sometimes it don’t. I think lemmy.ml is just getting slammed right now.

Try it with a community from a different instance.

Its federating to lemmy.ca now. : https://lemmy.ca/c/wow@lemmy.ml

I just had to bash the search form a few times. Intra-instance community discovery/seraching seems to be a bit “sticky” for lack of a better way to describe.

Also, as the “prime” instance lemmy.ml is getting hammered with new Reddit exodus users at the moment, so I suspect lemmy.ml may not be the most responsive atm.

I also find that sometimes the search takes… a while?

So by wow you’re talking about the world of warcraft community @ lemmy.ml?

Took a bit of futzing in the search screen but I see it:

Well that begs the question then - if communities are “homed” on instances (although the same community can exist on two different homes as completely separate communities) and then get “subscribed” or federated to other instances through searching, how does one know what all communities exist? Short of going to, or scraping the /Communities page of each Lemmy or Kbin instance, how does one know whats available?

Clearly we need a Lemmy411 Community. :)

Be the change you want to see in the world: https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy411 TADA!

I think mebbe that’s what OP is missing. A new (empty) instance doesn’t know anything about what other communities exist. @slashzero@lemmy.ml you gotta search for the communities before your instance will start snarfing posts.

Hrmm. Lets see. I’ve sub’d to @lemmy_support@lemmy.ml from my mastodon account. If this works, I should see THIS comment show up in my feed.

Yeah, I like how they tried to throw him under the bus. Terrible that, Canada being single party consent states/provinces for recording phone conversations.

Whups.

<realizes he has 10+ yrs of saved reddit posts to go archive now>

shit.

Fair enough. I was just surprised it popped up there, Im used to having to refresh the page to see new Reddit comments.

np!

So besides this: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request - which… I just requested for MY account, but I have no idea exactly what context or how much Ill get (my account is 10+ yrs)… there are a few:

There are also THIS: https://redditcommentsearch.com/ and THIS: https://camas.unddit.com/ which I have used to spelunk through my comment history before, which you COULD use to make a dump of your Reddit history, but it could take a while and be onerous (maybe write a powershell script to bash those utils with direct POST and GET requests, dunno).

I just found one thing that Lemmy in browser does that Reddit doesn’t do on the desktop. Your comment just pushed to the bottom of the thread I was writing a reply to. That was cool.