hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.
i’m infinitely grateful that all of you have decided to join us here, and the community has had very few issues with moderation or general unpleasantness to this point. i’m also been greatly appreciative of the support this community has already given us both financially and with your time and energy in keeping the site up and well tuned.
with that said: please temper your expectations of what is technically possible with the website and be patient about what is. there are literally thousands of you to accommodate now, and a finite number of hours to do it with.
more specifically: we (the Admins) are four people, only two of which have actual experience running or maintaining anything in the same universe of what we’re managing now. we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities. Lemmy itself has very limited base functionalities, many of which we’re trying to work around or with and constrain us in what we can do or how. a lot of options we have at our disposal to make stuff run are binary, and a lot of the not-binary options are confusing.
we’re sure this will get better eventually, but from that point follows this reality: we simply cannot currently (and may not in the future either, to be honest with you) accommodate a lot of what you might think we’re able to do, or expect because Reddit had it either through an app or the base function of the site. this software hasn’t had 15 years to mature in functionality and community addons like Reddit–and while it’s their full time gig, the upstream software is still maintained by just two people who also run the flagship instance here. they have a lot of shit on their plate too; we’re lucky they can even take time to get to our notes!
and that last point also brings us to a final thing to emphasize: this is not a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. i think doing this full time would be fucking miserable, personally, and i think i can speak for all of us in saying full-time working on this site is literally not something we can commit to. it has to be that way for this to be a solvent project.
if we split the balance of our donations equitably right now–all of which is site money, to be clear, we only use it for keeping the site online and paying for any labor we might source to someone else–that’d work out to just $500 per person, which is not even week of compensation at a wage of $15/hr. collectively, we have probably put in well over full-time hours just to keep the site going this week, and we did that last week too. we expect we’ll be doing this all month. that splitting also wouldn’t account for our volunteers who do most of the technical stuff, who have probably put in even more hours than we have, and who i personally think would deserve compensation before we do. (our site would be kind of fucked without them right now.)
all this to say: please be mindful of whether what you’re asking of us is even possible. we are trying really hard here and it’s not like a lot of what is brought up is invalid (i generally agree theoretically with a lot of what people have been bringing to us), but at least during our influx we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values”.
It’s important that you take care of yourselves. Not for Beehaw, but for your own well-being. The community will be here, or it won’t. It doesn’t really matter. We can all learn from whatever comes.
It’s also important that people understand what each instance on Lemmy aims to be, and that there are various other alternatives to be found. Not everyone will fit here, not due to resources/space, but in mentality. And that’s totally okay. It’s like finding a friend, you can’t force it.
I have nothing I feel is of substance to say except a huge THANK YOU!
Be wary if burn out! Take breaks, step away when needed. Having you guys still around in the future is more important than trying to compete with Reddit’s resources.
You’re managing fine as is already!
Thank you to everyone :
- Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
- Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
- Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
- Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit
There’s this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate “person who volunteers their own time” with “person who has to do anything I want them to do”. When stated that baldly it’s easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won’t fall into that trap.
Absolutely incredible work to not have a server spontaneously shit the bed and catch fire.
well, about that… it “catches fire” about once an hour and it’s been interesting to try to automate problem resolution with scripts and clever rate limits. More on our uptime/SLA plans here: 📢 Buzzworthy SLA Announcement 🐝 (in !support by me)
Take care of yourselves. The beauty of this whole deal is its not “one” it’s “all” of us. All the servers, all the users. There really is no reason to jump on one instance and put strain on good people doing a good thing. So often, good folks tend to over extend themselves. I’ve seen it time and again.
Be well beehaw.org admins and thank you.
This is impressive thus far. Keep up the good work!
For anyone who hasn’t had any experience running a server of any kind, it can be a lot of work. I’ve run Minecraft servers for my friends, first on hosted services, and then out of my basement. For like 5-10 friends. There were times I was giving up my entire weekend to get the MC server updated, research, get plugins and mods working, speaking with support people, and attempting to fix it all when it broke. When we were using hosted solutions, we technically split the cost, but every month I still had to go around semi-begging for donations (we were a bunch of poor college students/new grads). When I started hosting out of my basement, I bought the computer to run it. It was inexpensive, but still money entirely out of my own pocket.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
we’ve gone from running this on a potato to running it on something actually respectable, and also from ~$12/mo hosting costs to a baseline of around $100
Really impressed with this place and how it’s run so far! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently taking advantage of a cross training programme to get passable at the infrastructure side of things. I’d be happy to donate a weekend or two here and there for the sake of BeeHaw if that’s any use to you? I can’t commit a huge amount of time at the moment but I really like this community and I’ll contribute where I can if it’ll help keep the lights on.
What are the main pain points with Lemmy’s backend? I’ll dive into the code when I get some time and have a poke around to get familiar if nothing else.
I have no idea what Lammys backend is like, but would it be possible at a wide project level to implement a peer to peer popular tab?
I’m imagining each instance updating a file with what topics are hot on their instance and putting it into one big list to be sorted amongst all of the other instances.
That would fix a lot of discoverability issues and allow for communities to establish themselves cross instance. I don’t think it’s be that hard either, but what do I know.
Let it be run by instance with a whitelist and blacklist system so instances could effectively moderate against other less desirable communities of they want, and even make it opt in if desired.
I’m going to have to read up on how the protocol works in detail to be honest before I’d be able to say with any confidence what could and couldn’t be done but that would be a good feature I think. There is much less risk of ‘eternal Septembering’ smaller communities by swamping them with outsiders like /r/all does on Reddit here on Lemmy because affected communities can defederate at will.
ActivityPub has a concept of “shared inbox delivery” that could fit the bill, say, if federated instances delivered digests to each other and displayed them in a “public” tab.
To me, that’s the entire point of lemmy. You guys are doing what you want, and letting the rest of us play in your sandbox. It’s on us to play nicely, bring our own pails, and not poop in the sand.
You guys here, and at all of the instances I’ve run across, have gone out of your way to give us r/efugees a landing pad. I’ve received nothing but welcoming assistance at every turn, even when I’ve vented about the learning curve . What more could I ask for?
I think that it’s great what you’ve done here so far and I wish you all the best in your efforts!
Just a thought; If things ever calm down and you’re so inclined to share, I would love a “lessons learned” type post from you and the team. You’re possibly some of the foremost experts in the world at operating a Lemmy instance at this point and those of us with micro-instances running on random corners of the fediverse could certainly benefit from your hard-earned wisdom.
Thanks so much for everything!
I remember Reddit early days… it had its bumps along the way.
I don’t expect much this early in. Y’all do it at your pace… I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
thank you, it means the world to us :)
One of the great things about this instance is that I don’t think I’ve seen anyone complain about the setup in a way that reflects on you guys. There’s a lot of understanding that it’s early days and it’s grown exponentially in the last few weeks. I think the mentality of this instance is what keeps and will keep people here. It’s a nice space to be in.
So don’t worry, you guys are doing a great job!
I have already said everything I have to say, except: You are doing excellently with this instance!
Even if you set your goals small, your tireless work to meet them shows. The site is stable and the community feel remains great.
Funnily enough, you posted this to what appears to be one of the most understanding communities you could have lol
You and the rest of the team are doing a great job. Unfortunate I wasn’t able to make my account on the beehaw instance (just kept hanging on signup) but happy to still be able to interact with the great group you’ve help put together! Sending love from the PNW 😄
It’s highly possible that it just wasn’t approved because your application message didn’t provide enough information to make a judgement.
If you want to tell me your username, I’ll look for it and approve it.
I hope not as I wrote a small paragraph for each question asked lol
But it’s just Dee, like this lemmy.world one. I uh, submitted it quite a few times… sorry about that lol
You wrote one sentence for each question when you first submitted so that’s all we got. We are kinda harsh sometimes when it’s hard to gauge someone. Sorry about that.
It’s been approved!
Hey, don’t mean to pester you or anything but I haven’t received any emails from beehaw about whether the application was even received let alone approved. Checked spam/junk and all that. The sign up page just hangs after clicking “sign up” and when I tried the username/password I submitted to log in it also just infinitely hangs.
I’m working with lemmy.world atm so no need to rush but I do quite like the beehaw instance and would like to be apart of that if possible, thanks 😊
It should work… I can see that email was in fact sent to your email…
If your password is more than 60 characters long, you need to shorten it… This could also be some kind of bug… I’m not sure. We are updating Lemmy tomorrow morning so maybe that’ll fix it?
I’ll try again in the afternoon I suppose, checked my emails again and still nothing on this end. I checked my mail tracing too and nothing in transit or getting caught up on this end, so don’t know what to say about the email tbh.
I’ll reach out to the mod team tomorrow if I still have issues, thanks for getting back to me though
Your effort is much appreciated
