I just discovered mander today and am super excited by it. At numerous points in my musings on lemmy communities, I have returned to the question of sustainability. This is what brought me to mander: the thought that an instance can shut down at any moment, so I sought to diversify. Now I am encouraging some of my favorite subreddits to migrate here, and I was confronted with the same question of sustainability. It was phrased a bit more bluntly: " who pays for it and for how long?"
When the means dry up, what happens? Is the server transferred to another “owner”?
Are the costs low enough that it can be supported by existing resources (assuming user donations and a generous “owner”)?
External funding: Wikipedia might be a good model to follow? Government funding? Surely some of us have written grants.
I really want to see something like this grow and prosper. However I also want to be sure it is worth the time for the contributors and that I have good answers to my favorite forums when presented with the above questions.
Onward!
Hello MrSpectroscopy!
These are all fair and good questions. I have been meaning to put my thoughts on many issues and write an actual document to address some of these questions… To define better the scope of the instance, the rules, what can be expected, and to try to lay our a ‘privacy policy’. But you are already asking some of the questions here so I can begin to address them.
who pays for it"
I pay. Up to now the cost had been about $10/month. I recently upgraded the configuration to 100 GB disk, 2 CPUs, 3 GB Ram, and 50 Mbps network connection, and the cost is now closer to $20/month:
Moving forward, if growth continues, there are two alternatives:
With full transparency I will tell you that I would prefer to work with my own hardware rather than renting a dedicated server. Hosting an instance is a project that I do for fun, and I working with my own hardware is much more interesting than renting. I used to be quite pessimistic about the possibility of doing that because in many online communities I see people strongly advise against doing this. But I want to try anyway. I would like to create a setup with good hardware, a fast connection, good security, and even explicit permission from the ISP. If I succeed at this then the upfront cost is a few hundreds of euros, and I am more than happy to pay that to build my own a server.
If I go via the dedicated server route, then I can absorb the costs for some time. I think at the point costs would rise to $100 or $200 a month is the point at which I would consider adding a way to donate to help out with server costs. Before that time, I really would rather people donate to the Lemmy developers.
I don’t know. The most that I can guarantee is that I keep make backups in a machine in a different physical than the server, and that if I were to close the server I would at least do my best to let people know in advance and to give them the opportunity to save their content.
What I really would like is that by the time that this instance gets taken down, it will already be possible to migrate users and communities from one instance to another. This feature is not a priority, but it is a planned feature, and I am hopeful.
But I don’t know when that will happen, and I don’t know how long I can keep up with this instance. In comparison to the main instances - which have actual teams of people behind them - this specific instance is in the medium-risk category. I would not recommend moving a large community here if long-term stability is very important.
That is a tricky situation. As I said, I hope that by that time it is possible to migrate the content to other instances. Transferring a server to another “owner” is always a sensitive topic because of the issue of trust. Users that register in this instance are implicitly trusting me with some of their data. Lemmy does not make an effort to collect personal data (other than an optional e-mail), there are no trackers, fingerprinting, or anything like that. But there is still all of the content, the un-encrypted private messages, the hashed passwords, the likes/dislikes… and the idea of handing that over to someone else is not something I am eager to do. But if it comes to that, it would be up to the users. If users would want that, a way of doing it might be to give some months for users to “opt-in” for the transfer of ownership, and then purge every account that didn’t opt-in from the database. That’s just an idea.
Also consider the following:
The idea of Lemmy is not really to have a few big servers dominating the space - this just restores the previous, unwanted situation of having centralized sites where the admins can do whatever they want to control how we communicate. I created “Mander” as an instance that is quite general - science, nature, and technology. But I do not for one second believe that a single instance should attempt to dominate over all of these topics! It makes sense to create an instance like this now only because the communities are still small, but as the number of people grow, I really think that a single instance should be more like a “subreddit” than a “reddit”. Examples of this are a /r/mujico community that moved to lemmy at https://mujico.org, and more recently the /r/piracy community that you can find at https://lemmy.dbzer0.com
So, to people that have large communities on reddit and want to move them to the fediverse, my recommendation is to find someone who you trust in the community who is willing to set up the instance, it is not difficult. The community can then have more control and freedom, the instance can be as stable as the community itself, and they contribute to distributing the load on the network ;)
Uff, scrolling back up, I see that this ended up being quite a lengthy essay… My apologies!
As someone who has done both cloud VPS and local hosting, I agree that local hosting on your own hardware is much more fun. I was going to spin up my own instance of Lemmy but found this one instead!
Since there’s no way to load balance servers the best I can offer right now is an off-site backup location for the database if you were looking for redundancy. But happy to offer any help I can going forward.
If you ever decide to run your instance and you need any help let me know! There is also an active chat on Matrix.
Thank you for the offer! The current size is very manageable (~30 GB) and I have a redundant off-site copy and a few different options (like external SSDs and my office computer) available to increase the redundancy if needed, so I think that I have this issue covered without needing to bother other people with responsibilities!
This is a great answer, thank you very much! I can see how it might be a fun project to have my own instance and interact with other such as this awesome one. This gives a lot of info to use in “managing expectations”. If anything, I am always happy to connect with others sharing a passion for science.