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!
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There’s !halifax@lemmy.ca and !novascotia@lemmy.ca
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I believe you would only see them on the instance if someone else on this instance is part of the community. Otherwise I think you have to go to the community page website itself and link yourself.
Someone else described the process in another comment:
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/72219
Probably too early. The best thing would probably be to join or create a Canada community, and when that gets big enough you can create one for Nova Scotia. It’s going to take time to build userbase and we want to create active communities instead of skipping steps and trying to recreate reddit overnight.
I was thinking along the same lines. But at the same time a bigger community for Canada as a whole may get started somewhere. Maybe we could stay broad and say Atlantic Canada? Since this place is based here.
That’s for you to decide, I’m not Canadian so I’m not really sure what would make sense. My instinct is that eventually there will be a Canada community and a Nova Scotia and/or Halifax community. So at that point idk how useful an Atlantic Canada community would really be. If it’s going to be a thing, it’d make sense for it to be hosted here. But it’s all you man, if you wanna build a community just go for it.
It’s tough because on reddit the eventual Canada subreddit that popped up ended up having bad mods. Many of us left to /r/onguardforthee so even having two Canadas doesn’t sound so bad if needed. Though right now I would join whichever is biggest atm.
Yeah thats the beauty of this platform, if the creators/mods of a community end up sucking, you can just make a duplicate with the same name on another server. On reddit you always had to come up with a new name which really fragmented communities imo. Like I had no idea about r/onguardforthee, so the mods of r/Canada were essentially camping on that subreddit name and wasting it (according to what you’ve told me). On Lemmy you can just move to a different server and newbies can still find the community easily bc it has the same name.