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!
  • 87785638@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    Thank you very much for setting up this instance. I’m honored to be one of the first folks to join up. Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.

  • coderofhonor@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    Just to clarify, individual accounts will be in trouble if they subscribe to communities on other servers that break the rules? Or are they blocked by default?

    • ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      I don’t your personal account will get in trouble for subbing to rule breaking communities, but if the instance hosting those communities is blocked by this one you won’t be able to see those posts anymore.

    • Tin_ghost@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      My understanding is that each instance has its own selection of content it allows to be hosted by that instance. But your username/password can log into any instance, and access that content. When you do this, the content is not transfered to the instance your UN/PW is from (your origin), but access to that content is granted as you have a federated log-in. What is brought to the origin instance is like a pin in a map that can then be seen by the origin server, and added to the origins directory for other users on the origin to see. Each instance has its own directory based on the pins that instances users have placed throughout the internet/fediverse.

      Back to your question, and this is my understanding of how it works. You won’t find any NSFW communities hosted on sh.itjust.works, but you can see & access nsfw communities from others (lem.my, lemme.one etc…) using your sh.it login. I think you as a user will be able to add NSFW to your feed, but it won’t be on the directory for others to find if the admins blacklisted that content/community.

      This is my first post on any of the fediverse, and I am partly posting this to see if I am way off base, so please correct me!

    • Klaymore@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      Could always post a link to images/video through an IPFS gateway I guess, although idk if the browser extension automatically fetches those through IPFS or just uses the gateway.

    • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      You’d need people willing to host the data at scale. IPFS is just a transport. Need some kind of effort to get everyone to run the client and make pinning things easier. Without changes it’d explode all the current hosting options.

      • Secret300@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 years ago

        There’s this website that has an ipfs node built into it. https://www.dreamlink.cloud/

        Imagine if an instance had that so no one had to install an ipfs client but can change a setting to use one if they wanted to

        edit: that’d also make it so as long as people are on the site or have it open then the file would still be shared

        • linearchaos@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          3 years ago

          Yeah, they’re called IPFS gateways there are a number of them. It’s a public webserver that also runs the IPFS client. Some cache, some don’t. They’re intended so someone can get access to a file that’s on an IPFS node.

          If the gateway is set not to cache, the file still gets loaded from it’s source AND the gateway pays to download the file and upstream it to you. If the gateway is set to cache, They also pay to host the file.

          Someone has to pay to run them. When the requests are sparse they’re super cheap. When you throw a petebyte of data to be cached, they’ll stop being free. Cloudflare runs a caching IPFS gateway, links that start costing too much or that contain copywritten data get shut down by them.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      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.

      • trashcan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        0·
        3 years ago

        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.

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
          0·
          3 years ago

          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.

          • trashcan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            3 years ago

            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.

            • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
              0·
              3 years ago

              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.

  • phase_change@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Just want to say, thanks for this instance and thanks for this type of transparency. I’ve never given Reddit money, but if you do get to the point of wanting/needing help with keeping this going, I’m ready.

    I was involved with moderating a listserv of around 15k users in the early 90’s. Most of you won’t know what a listserv was or that the early 90’s was pre-web. I can only imagine the issues you’ll soon be dealing with.

    Thank you!

  • scrollbars@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    It’s very gracious of you to stand up this instance with your own resources. I’m used to the idea of donating to my fedi home instances, and other fediverse regulars are probably the same way. Just give us the word if you do need donations down the road (ie. for storage upgrades, etc).

  • hllywluis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Thanks for such an awesome instance that to me personally rivals the main lemmy.ml. I will most likely continue to use this instance as my main account, and will definitely consider donating in the future, whenever you open that up.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      I haven’t experienced the issue you’re describing. But I have seen other weird things like the number of votes on posts changing when I upvote or sometimes actually seeing the comments from one post on a totally different post! But I’m the type to find that kinda thing entertaining like a Skyrim glitch or something. But yeah this platform is really raw and not easy to use but the userbase is quality so I’m powering through 🫡

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      In your user settings I see that you can change the default sorting. Maybe Hot is better than Active for you? I confess I’m still learning.

    • flambonkscious@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 years ago

      From memory, there’s an identified bug due to the user of a thing called websockets which they’re going to move off in the near future…

  • BackOnMyBS@kbin.social
    0·
    3 years ago

    would Pixelfed be a working alternative for hosting image files, then linking over?

    I’m really getting into the whole Fediverse and trying to limit use of for-profit proprietary services. FOSS or death!

  • BackOnMyBS@kbin.social
    0·
    3 years ago

    would Pixelfed be a working alternative for hosting image files, then linking over?

    I’m really getting into the whole Fediverse and trying to limit use of for-profit proprietary services. FOSS or death!

  • hydrashok@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Thanks for hosting!

    I signed up very quickly and (of course) didn’t log my random password. Tried the reset link a few times but don’t seem to be getting any links to the reset page.

    I’ll wait to see if they come through – thankfully still logged on where I initially signed up – but still wanted to make you aware.

    EDIT: Also sent you a DM. Thanks!

    EDIT2: TheDude abides, and fixed this for us! I was able to reset successfully. Huzzah!

  • madsmith@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Thanks for hosting. As a former retired technologist, let me encourage you to consider that growth can follow a logistic growth curve, which can resemble exponential growth.

    I’d love to see this community succeed. But it’s long-term sustainability will need to account for the costs of keeping these instances running at scale.

    Would love to see someway that we the community can participate in supporting the continued operation of this community.

  • Dolphinfucker420@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    RIP the marriage dude. You’re a real one for hosting this o7

    About the storage; have you considered deleting posts and comments above a certain age? I don’t think it’s expected of a single person to host the amount of data that comes with sites like these in the long term. I’m sure I’m just telling you something you already thought of or something that doesn’t work etc etc but I figured id say something idk

    Side note what’s the hardware cost you’ve invested into this. How much would I actually have to put down to host a lemmy server or something like it? Always been curious