It’s the first option in the dropdown:

Big thanks to all maintainers and contributors!

I kind of get where you’re coming from, but to me it sounds like you’re looking for a different experience than what Lemmy is designed for. It seems you are more interested in aggergating all posts about specific topics (like “books”), and strongly limiting the effect of moderation (as nobody would have final say about how to moderate an entire topic). If I correctly understood the experience you’re interested in, then for sure the design of Lemmy will not match that.

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this as a fatal flaw, though. Lemmy is not built around the idea of generic, “ownerless” topics, instead, it’s built around communities with clear owners. We have decentralization at the admin and infrastructure level (as in, a single admin does not control the entire network), but this does not really mean we also need to have it at individual community level.

IMO it’s totally fine that different people create different communities with extremely similar purposes. The entire internet as a whole also works like this - the internet itself is decentralized, but at the same time people can create different websites with very similar purposes (and even domains!), and it works out fine. For example, it’s totally possible for there to exist a news.com, news.co.uk, news.ee, news.fi, etc. Imagine if whenever you navigated to news.fi with your browser, it would also automatically insert content from all the other news websites of all possible domains - it doesn’t really seem like a useful feature, but that’s kind of analogous to what you’re suggesting for Lemmy at the moment.

It’s OK to post questions here:

Feel free to post and upvote questions beforehand in this post, as it will turn into the AMA tomorrow.

Do you think Lemmy is decentralized enough right now, or are you worried about some of the bigger instances growing too much?

Thanks for releasing it so quickly!

This “sunaruas” sounds like a cool guy 😛

Awesome work, big thanks to all who contributed!

• numbers_online is currently a lemm.ee-specific bug, will be fixed soon!
• subscribers only shows local subscribers, IMHO it’s not super useful like this, maybe it can change in the future
• Discrepancies in the active users/posts/comments come from flaky federation. This is most likely going to improve a lot as instances upgrade to 0.18.1, with more improvements coming in the future!

IaC is awesome 👍 lemm.ee is deployed using Terraform.

My lemmy_server redundancy is mostly just so I can do infra changes without downtime (just take one node out of the load balancer, redeploy it and put the new one in), but it does also help a bit with general performance. I agree it’s not strictly necessary, the vast majority of other instances are just running on a single server, but I do think it’s very nice to have.

For back-ups, I have point-in-time recovery, so I can restore the database to any random timestamp - and it has actually come in useful once already when two weeks ago I was able to restore to a good state about a few minutes after a problem - I think nobody even noticed that anything happened in that case 😃

$200 is still on the low end, trust me - high end managed databases and compute resources are in the thousands, adding redundancy to that will double or triple it 😃

The costs will vary wildly depending on how the instance has been set up. If you set up all necessary services on a single VPS (as is the most common approach for smaller instances), then you can probably get by on $10-$20 a month. Splitting different services onto different servers, adding backups, load balancing, CDNs, redundancy, caches, etc will quickly increase the cost. Bigger instances need more powerful servers, that will increase the cost further.

On lemm.ee, we are currently not using very high-end servers, but we ARE using all the other things I mentioned above, and the monthly cost is currently hovering around $200 (that’s for 3 servers, a managed database, object storage, load balancing, a global CDN, and an e-mail provider). This is still on the very cheap side in the grand scheme of running online platforms, but definitely much more than I would want to pay for a single-user instance for example.

I really like the overall concept of Lemmy, so I decided to set up lemm.ee to support the Lemmy network with my skillset. I have previously had the privilege of being responsible for running large platforms online (end-to-end, everything from operations to software engineering), and so far, this experience seems to be extremely relevant for running Lemmy in its current state.

As for paying for hosting, my initial plan was to to just pay for everything myself as kind of a hobby, but the userbase at lemm.ee has been very gracious in first asking me several times to share costs, and then actually sending money once I set up donations. I’m not sure yet if this donations-based funding will be sustainable, or if it will fall off after the initial hype dies, but for now it’s really awesome to see that there are several other people who believe in lemm.ee and want to share financial responsibility for it.

Bots can get through basically all verification.

In theory, you are absolutely correct. In practice, the currently active wave of bots are specifically targeting instances without captchas.

The defederation is more political than it is about spam bots.

There are several instances which are only defederating spam bot instances at the moment.

Lately I’ve been registering domains directly at Cloudflare. If you’re a Cloudflare user anyway then it’s super convenient!

The only downside is that they don’t support less popular TLDs (yet).

What I would do in this situation would be a 4-day fast. It’s not for everybody, but you might want to at least consider it, because it’s definitely doable, and some people even claim it’s healthy (disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, don’t take medical advice from random people on the internet).

To prepare, I would suggest switching to OMAD (one meal a day - effectively you will be fasting 23h every day) up until the trip. OMAD will help your body adjust to long periods of not eating. To be successful with OMAD, you need to ensure that your single meal will cover your daily calorie and nutrient needs. There’s a bunch of resources about it online if you search.

Eat your last meal 48h before the trip - this will give you a chance to empty your bowels before you leave. Every day, make sure you drink enough electrolytes + take multivitamins. On the final day of your trip, it should be safe to have a SMALL meal (do not overdo it, you can hurt yourself by eating too much after a fast) - it should take your body over a full day before you’ll need to poop.

How long do you have to prepare? Personally, when I first started doing OMAD, it took me over a month before my body became adjusted to fasting. But now, it just feels completely natural.

I love working on software, so that wouldn’t change in general. If money was a complete non-issue, I would be only doing open source projects.

Hot is my favorite so far!

There’s also !UKPolitics@lemm.ee here already!

This could mean that syncing is in progress between these two instances. In that case, if you check back in a bit, you should see all the comments.

Edit: just to clarify, I am speculating here - I’m still learning how it all works myself

It seems that if nobody on your instance has previously interacted with a particular community from another instance, then it won’t show up under “all” in the communities list.

In this situation, you should be able to search for the full name of the community (!community@instance), that should trigger a sync of that community. After that, you’ll be able to subscribe.

Note that it’s also possible for instance admins to block some other instances completely - in that case, you won’t be able to subscribe to any communities from that particular instance.