In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we’ll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit’s costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

There are some folks in the lemmy_support area lurking around offering help on the technical side, if that’s what you’re after! Many don’t have time to dedicate to running a full instance themselves, but are happy to help with the setup

This is basically why I’m sticking around, besides being able to have a copy of the content I consume on servers I can do something about (ie, backup.)

Not expecting things to get better after IPO personally

Take a look at https://browse.feddit.de/

There’s a auto-updating list showing even the popularity level - helps a ton finding them!

Current communities are popping up like crazy today and the previous couple days, so it’s a bit to keep track of.

Use a web archiver on old.reddit.com and store the stuff away for now, is my recommendation. There are concerns about ownership of the content on reddit from a legal perspective, so best to archive as a reference more than anything

I’ve barely got any posts on there, so I’ve kind of just left my account for now. I’ll purge it later on once I feel like all of my niche communities I need are elsewhere.

I however, do not visit it more than once a day now though, and I expect that frequency to drop-off (primarily for local level news right now - too small to expect them to migrate elsewhere for now)

Did it for years - takes a bit to get used to the tower you are attached to swaying when you’re 300’ up.

Before my company I was with would send people for the expensive training, they’d have people try climbing up one of their towers 50’ or so with experienced techs to see if they could manage it (proper safety gear and all of course). I’d say 2/3 would panic and come down at about the 30’ mark

It’s a fraction of the work of an email server, if you’re not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work

Regular backups should do the job. It’s all run in docker instances with mapped volumes, so you can just backup those contents regularly and roll-back worst case if things completely pooped out. Otherwise maintenance isn’t really much worse than a normal webserver - great for learning Linux CLI if you’re not already familiar.

No reason you shouldn’t spin up a node though! The more the better - lets load spread out.

Yep - but each user needs to be approved by an admin. So if things started getting rowdy I’m sure admins would close things on the bigger instances to focus more on modding, and de-fed rowdy instances that can’t keep up at least temporarily.

Yeah, this is a golden moment for those of us who like to learn from sudden heavy load on server software! There are not very many teachable moments like this out there, so I’m trying to soak everything up for work experience

Maybe, maybe not, but the instances have the option of closing registrations for a bit if they get overwhelmed and need to regroup. This is why it’s nice to see lots of other instances popping up across the fediverse

It’s still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they’re using though in their financial statements if you’re curious, but there’s of operational optimization being tried out to see what’ll help.

The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn’t too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.

I’m on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I’m subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I’m not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.

I fired up my own personal test instance so I can experiment with figuring out ways to reduce bottlenecks on the sysadmin/devops side - used to run the various PHP forums back in the day, so hoping to pass on some knowledge eventually.

I figure the toxic side(s) will gravitate towards instances that will tolerate their behaviour which is easier to deal with. Mods will be busy for a little bit though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if registrations closed for a bit on some of the bigger instances so they can catch up if they don’t just fall flat over on the heavy days. But, lots of smart folks trying to prep for this.

Lived in hot parts of the states and Canada. Pretty much just stay hydrated and take cooloff breaks when possible (whether AC, or cold showers.) Inside, use reflective or white materials to block windows to reflect sunlight out - blackout curtains are fantastic for this. Become a goblin - the sun is your enemy indoors when it comes to super hot days, especially if you do not have AC.

Also, do hot activities outside. Ie, BBQ all the things and don’t run the stove or oven if possible.

Not much you can do about sweat. Just be sure to dry out your clothes every here and there so you don’t have moist clothes on 24/7, or you could end up with a fungal skin infection (in folds if you have any, or the more private areas.)

Brave - works mobile and desktop for me.

I’ll also mention that if the UCP fractures, my guess is a vote of confidence will be called and we’ll be back to the polls and they’ll be punished hard for it like last time

Regardless how anyone feels about a specific party, I think that it is good that the election showed the ruling party needs to cater to voters more. Will they? Doubt it - I have a feeling the party (UCP) may eventually fracture, but it’s a good thing for them to have some competition

Sigh <- that’s about my thoughts on it (as someone also in AB)

Edit: But also more of it was a lot closer than expected really in many ridings. Look closely at Calgary and there were some very very close races (ie, under 1000 votes)

I wanted reddit, but with the ability to archive my data for later usage. Ie, I wanted to be able to have all my content readable at least even if where it was posted went down (whether briefly or permenantly)

Lemmy lets me run my own instance, so it works great for this. Gives me some sort of control of my destiny, while still being able to participate in essentially message boards.