I have a number of Lemmy instances meant for discussion groups around specific topics. They are not being as used as I expected/hoped. I would like to set them up in a way that they can be owned by a consortium of different admins so that they are collectively owned. My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
I personally am not a huge fan of this idea. Instances are at the end of the day communities of their own in a way. One community may want to discuss a topic in one way and another community may want to discuss it in another way. This seems to be a way to centralize all discussion around a topic in one community, but we should rather go for decentralized communities.
But hey that’s just my opinion, if others like it, go for it.
You are running an instance that is geared to serve people of an specific region. And I agree that they kind stay between the two extremes of the “group-focused” and “people-focused” instances.
The idea of topic-based instances are for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal, but it doesn’t mean that they should be absolute. So, if you want to talk about Apple stuff in general, !apple@hardware.watch would make more sense, but if you are trying to reach a group of Apple users in your area, then you can have a community on your local instance as well.
for the cases where the culture is more-or-less universal
When is this ever true? The idea of a “universal culture” is exactly what I mean with this encouraging centralization. Even a specific community (subreddit) on a centralized service like Reddit will have a specific culture that is not in line with any “universal culture” (it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries, just to mention an example).
I don’t mean universal in the sense of “totalitarian”, I mean it in the sense of “large common denominator”.
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
it’s likely to be skewed towards whatever culture exists in western english-speaking countries
This is good enough for most people and does not hinder the ability of those that are in the minority to create a different/specialized community.
Centralization/decentralization is a spectrum. No one is proposing to force everyone into a single box. The idea is only to combine efforts for the things that exist in common and to avoid unnecessary redundancies.
Do you think that the conversation around, e.g, python programming or wood turning techniques will vary so much that it warrants many specific flavors?
I don’t see why not. Human culture is like a fractal after all :P. At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics, because different approaches is part of decentralization.
At least I don’t think we should discourage creating different places for the same topics
I’m not discouraging it. To repeat: the idea is not to push a “there can be only one” mentality, but to set up a system that can work well for the 80% of people who can be satisfied with the median case.
Community collections should be a thing. Something like /cc/Technology could pull in lemmy.world/ other instances and collections of communities. It makes it easier if one instance dies, an instance de-federates itself, or just wanting to consolidate all the different
/c/Technologycommunities across instances.It would also be nice if communities had the option to vote on their admins once in a while. Having individuals lord over different communities is a problem in reddit.
Multi communities have been funded: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy
Excellent! Thanks. Ill take a look at it sometime. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818
Last time I checked, there was still discussion on how people want this to work. Because its easy to say, but hard to get everyone to agree.
Yeah I remember asking about it cause it was a feature that existed on Kbin https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/issues/486
I even created a dedicated thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee:
https://kbin.melroy.org/m/fedigrow@lemm.ee/t/426059/Feature-tracking-Multicommunities-multimagazines#comments
That’s an argument that is:
- application specific
- agency-removing (only Lemmy devs can do something about)
- orthogonal to the stated problem
Im a dev. But you do you. GL!
I think this sounds like a good idea. A problem when starting a community is that one wants to find a stable home; it might make sense to set up camp at, say, hardware.watch, but without knowing who operates it it might feel more uncertain than lemmy.world.
And then, as a result, if lemmy.world ever disappears or has problems, it’ll take way too many communities with it.
If these topic-specific instances had some sort of collective ownership, I guess we could more effectively guarantee for their continued survival, and it might be more tempting for existing communities to move over there.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to
!football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?And a piece of constructive feedback: Vague community names like !main@soccer.forum is probably less likely to attract attention than something specific like !nba@nba.space - when searching for a community, people look up the community name rather than the domain.
I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of some admins - would !football@lemmy.world be interested in moving to
!football@soccer.forum, given the right organization?I’m not the main mod of !football@lemmy.world so it’s really not my decision to make, but moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
Moving away from lemmy.world and their annoying VPN restrictions would be nice though.
moving the community to a domain with the word soccer in it is a tough pill to swallow. As silly as it may sound, there’s a lot of people that don’t like having football referred to as soccer.
Sounds silly indeed, but I agree (https://feddit.org/comment/2048090 )
I had a feeling that would be an issue!
On the one hand, football@soccer would be a good compromise.
On the other, we’re right, the Americans are wrong. Simple as that. So I sympathise with the lack of willingness to compromise on the matter.
Americans are wrong
Don’t forget Australia, NZ, S Africa, and a few other places like Japan.
How accurate is this map? If the Irish call football soccer, it would be most shocking thing I’ve learnt in 2024.
Just checked, they call it football. Like everyone with half a braincell.
I’m sure the Irish call it football when they speak English, but what about in Irish? If Google translate to Irish is trustable,
English to Irish Football = Peil
But also Soccer = Sacar
So maybe there’s two accepted variants. But where does Pail come from anyway? Let’s translate it back to English:
Peil = Very big potato
So most of the world plays football, some strange corners of it play soccer, and the Irish play very big potato.
I’d love if a native speaker could confirm this. #Irish #Gaeilge #football @gaeilge@a.gup.pe @football@a.gup.pe
Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.
As I’m sure my home instance reveals, I do like the idea of focused instances. I think a general sports focused instance would be better than sport specific instances though, at least with lemmy’s current size. It’s not sustainable to pop up an instance for every sport out there, like strongman or arm wrestling.
And people would also have to be able to sign up to the instance. Which if I remember correctly you had a very different opinion on when you spoke to Snowe on !meta@programming.dev about programming.dev. Just from a technical standpoint, the federation latency and general wonkiness is real and is why my football bots are running on Lemmy.world despite programming.dev being my preferred instance. Near real-time communication is important during live games where minutes may drastically change the topic.
And while I’m sympathetic to your cause, inertia is a real thing and lemmy.world is competently run, even if I strongly disagree with their VPN restriction.
If you somehow managed to convince the other sports communities to migrate to a common instance I’d happily follow along though, but I find it very unlikely happen. ReadyUser31@lemmy.world is the one primarily in charge of !football@lemmy.world
Yeah, I realized the issue with “main” as the name after the second time I wanted to post something and realized that the domain name is not used in the search field. I’ll suck it up and just create a new community.
New users to lemmy usually aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there. And people who are really invested in a topic will want to have that domain for their account. You’re cutting off a lot of the users that would grow your communities.
I don’t mind the idea of a collective to handle a bunch of instances, but I feel like you’re going about it the wrong way. When the same person make a bunch of instances about a variety of topics, it looks as if they aren’t that invested in any specific community. From my experience, the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
Also the idea that communities can be ‘neutral ground’ doesn’t make sense to me. People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there. In some situations it might work out fine, but if anyone thinks it’s caused by how you’re running your sites, they may defederate from the whole collection.
aren’t going to join communities if they can’t register there.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.
the most active communities start off with a few people who care almost obsessively about that topic.
There are two different, orthogonal issues here:
- people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
- people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
People will leave or join based on how the admins and mods run them, whether or not the users are hosted there.
Not my experience. A few examples:
- No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
- Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
- Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Why?! The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.
For people who’ve used lemmy or the rest of the fediverse yes, but most people don’t know that yet. If someone shares a post from your site with their friends or a facebook group, they’re not going to look into how lemmy works to sign up elsewhere.
- people that are looking for a community in a niche interest, do not find it, and go back to Reddit.
- people that are in a big instance and create (or sometimes, recreate) a community for a popular topic. This happens quite often and not because they were not satisfied with the existing communities, but just because they could not find them.
The idea of having topic-specific instances is an attempt to mitigate issue #2.
I’d prefer it if topic specific instances were more popular too. I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
I feel a technical solution like federation pulling in lists of communities with would help more with discoverability.
Not my experience. A few examples:
- No one complained about the mods from !linux@lemmy.ml, yet I’ve witnessed endless discussions about moving away from lemmy.ml.
I’m not sure how that goes against what I said. That’s mostly people disliking the admins.
- Beehaw defederated from LW, so this forced users of these instances to “choose” between the communities and/or create accounts on both of them if they wanted to keep following the whole conversation.
Similar issues could happen even if users are separate from the communities. Beehaw could defederate your instances, and lemmy world could defederate programming dev or something, and people would need other accounts if they want to see everything.
- Personally, I do not want to join or participate extensively in communities that are on LW if we have a topic-specific instance for it. I know that I am not the only one.
Me too. I usually avoid lemmy world communities unless there isn’t an active community elsewhere.
I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.
Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don’t want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.
The whole point of federation is to let people join communities even when they don’t have an account in the same server.
[citation needed], because it disagrees with the “whole point” I can find
I think there may be a challenge or challenges that you haven’t pinned down yet. First is: what problem does this solve?
Second is, how will people know that they are housed under the same roof, so to speak? A small instance dedicated to NBA basketball may be interesting, but if it seems disconnected then people would be wary. Small specialty instances can be shut down without warning for all sort if reasons.A consortium of instances may help with this issue, as long as it is immediately clear through common branding that they are part if the same group.
Third is that different communities have different needs.
Also, if we assume that the entire idea is to have more than one admin, then what change does that actually include?
You now have 3-4 people that can go and randomly delete the whole server instead of 1? Do you know that right now, only 1 person has the credentials to the admin account of whatever server you’re talking about?
It seems kind of slimy.
If you don’t want the communities, stop squatting them. Having no users seems like just a way to keep costs down so you can hold onto more urls and is bad for the general ecosystem anyways.
deleted by creator
It’s amazing, there is always someone that will look at other people are doing and find the worst possible take.
I decided to reach out to other admins precisely because I got tired of hearing “you are running all these instances by yourself, who guarantees that you are not going to do something nasty with them or disappear if you lose interest?”, even though I’m running all these instances by myself, keeping them up to date, posting regularly on a good number of them, trying to get more people involved for over an year and (most importantly) outliving a bunch of “community-based instances” .
Seriously, this crab mentality is the worst. What a disgrace.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
I’m skeptical about this since you are squatting on at least 18 urls while trying to get volunteers to create value out of them. Nothing leads me to assume you are being altruistic.
Edit: misattributed something, woops
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize and trying to hold the most potential instances without putting any work or money into it. It’s just my impression.
I also think instances without users are a terrible idea and I’d rather real instances come about organically instead created by people that actually care about the subject.
Just coordinate the release of the urls and the transfer of the instance.
This is exactly what I am offering. I want to transfer these instances to a consortium to own this collectively.
without putting any work or money into it.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
I’m not even looking to dump these costs on the potential new co-owners, this is why I said that I don’t mind keep running them.
It seems like you are waiting for the next influx to potentially monetize
First, we’d have to argue the implication. You are implying that any attempt at building anything that is financially sustainable is immoral, something that I said many times is completely misguided, and a point of view that is starting now to be shared by other prominent figures in the Fediverse.
Second, I am offering the instances to be co-owned precisely to assuage those concerns. By having other admins co-owning the instances, I’d hope that less people would be pushing those accusations against me.
Just yesterday I renewed 10 of these domains. That cost me ~400€. I renewed nba.space and nfl.community last month, each cost ~650€. Running all these instances is costing me ~200€/month.
Thank you for providing the numbers, these domains are quite pricey if you have to pay 1700 € per year on domains alone.
Stop thinking in terms of prices, and start thinking in terms of value. A three-letter domain for less than 1000€ is a bargain.
I’m thinking in terms of costs because those could prevent any admins potentially interested in joining you to do so.
Lemmy.ml still runs on a server which costs 80€ per month (https://lemmy.ml/comment/13507604). A .ml domain name costs 61€ per year on gandi.
Your hosting costs are 2.5x higher, your domain costs are 27 times higher.
Maybe you’ll find other admins who agree with you that it’s worth it.
Which part of “I am not asking for financial support” is not clear from the blog post?
You sound like a grifter.
So are you willing to give up ownership of the url and have the instance be transfered to someone else’s hardware?
Maybe I misunderstood where you are going with this.
To be precise, I’m willing to give up some ownership. I still want to participate in its governance.
someone else’s hardware?
If a new consortium is formed and if the collective decision is to move it, yes. If the decision is to keep as it is, also fine.
Well you definitely are breeding a welcoming culture here.
Please, spare me from the cheap rhetoric.
I’ve been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.
Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.
It’s tiring and frustrating.
…k
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn’t it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
I remember after the exodus community discovery in Lemmy was hard, and it made sense to create instances like these. But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate? So isn’t it a problem if all moderators would be from different instances?
Reports are still not federated
I would assume the “rendezvous” instance would collect all posts from all communities it is subscribed to, and show them to the users as if it came from a single instance. So moderation would be limited to the moderators of the actual instance behind it.
The explorer makes it easier to discover them, but would be even better if that’s automated.
“rendezvous instances” is a perfect term for them…
If a moderator is from a different instance, can they effectively moderate?
Yes, I haven’t had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
But nowadays with Lemmy Explorer and with multiple community promo communities I think it’s not really hard to find the topics you are interested in.
This approach does not address two issues that would be resolved by separating “community instances” from “people instances”:
- Centralization of communities around the big instances, creating a “too big to fail” scenario. Last I checked, more than half of the top 100 communities are on LW.
- Political/Ideological differences among larger instances causing needless fragmentation of the communities. E.g, there were discussions before about moving communities from .ml because some people didn’t want to be associated with the Lemmy devs. Some were in favor, some were against. By having the communities on neutral ground, not only this whole issue is sidestepped, it also makes it easier for both sides of the table to be able to join one single community and make the overall fediverse stronger.
Yes, I haven’t had any issue moderating things from communick.news, even on communities that are not here.
Reports still do not federate, that’s the main issue with federated moderation
Pinning threads is buggy across instances.
Also
I don’t like this kind of community/user instance because 2 instances have to deal with the same problem. E.g. a rogue user can troll on most community instances until they are banned by their user instance.
The instance fragmentatios is not as big issue as it’s quite easy to create new accounts. There was a thread about this some days ago here, I also use different accounts on different instances for different topics.
I understand your concerns with moderation, but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
What would stop a troll to create different accounts on all the other different instances, or create another account whenever they get banned?
but I don’t see how what I am proposing would make things more difficult?
Now when a user reports a troll, the report goes to the moderators of the community. But in special cases the admins of the user instances should deal with banning. So the admins of the community instances have to deal with reports, but the solution is at the hand of the user instance admins. It’s the same as dealing with users from other instances, but an edge case.
My recommendations would be something like this: (I’m just a random user, so it’s just my point of view)
- Shut down the fully inactive instances. Noone will even even notice it
- Merge the semi active communities to a handful of instances, like sports and technology… . I’ve seen active communities move instances, it would be possible, take a look how !europe@feddit.de migrated to !europe@feddit.org. Give enough time for subscribers to notice and subscribe to the new one.
- Allow registration of moderators on these instances, so they can work around the current limitations of moderation tools. Maybe an invite only solution or something like this.
- You could find help more easily if you look for admins for 3-4 instances instead of for 18 instances.
This would be useful for you and other admins, because you would have to admin much less number of instances. They would be still considered small instances, compared to big one, so you still not at the “too big to fail” level. For users it would help community discovery, there are overlap between followers of similar topics, e.g. I have friends who follow both European football and NBA at the same time, I read both selfhosting related topics and about general tech support, etc…
-
I am not planning to close any instances. I am not working on them based on their current activity, but I am keeping them for a scenario where a mass migration away from Reddit actually happens.
-
When I say admins only, that can be extended to moderators as well.
-
I don’t run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.
I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?
Closed for registrations = no instance user accounts
I assumed, by “They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.”, that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn’t realize their instances were already closed-registration.
Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.
I am not sure what “instance members” you are referring to, here.
The topic-based instances are closed for registration, so there are no users there.
If you are referring to the communick.news instance: it is only configured to have admins creating communities on it and the general instructions are to use https://fediverser.network as the place to discover communities.
Why?
That just locks communities off. Wh ich you could readily do before Lemmy, just host a forum. Discourse is a pretty damn cool software for it. Close registrations, close visibility, and allow users in on a per-user basis. That’s also a lot how Tildes works, and I remember people here don’t like that very much.
From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.
Now it makes even less sense.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple, and we also don’t allow local users. But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin? There’s still the problem of course of how to handle someone being an admin on a technical level, and I don’t see a solution to that. Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
But still, what’s the point? It doesn’t improve anything, in fact it actively makes it worse. If you want communities to be resistant to server removal, you’d need a way to… federate the community. So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy and these keep federating to each other (copy). As in, there’s no original any more, but good luck keeping all of that consistent. 😅 In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy (good luck with that power trip bonanza) and no central admin to remove the mods, or they cannot moderate each other, in which case good luck figured out how to block on a per-post basis depending on laws in your particular country getting the content federated over.
Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.
I am not trying to be mean, it’s just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.
So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple
Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.
Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?
You don’t need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.
It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.
But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?
I can’t even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.
If you want communities to be resistant to server removal
Another non-sequitur.
So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy
How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?
In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy
Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?
Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?
I’m not sure they do, I was confused by their comment as well.
Ah, sorry if that wasn’t clear, the entire second half was theoretical about a better way of doing this.
A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more. It exists equally on all servers, so any being removed would have ~0 effect.
I mentioned that basically because I feel that’s a much better solution to the problem than shared ownership + locked registrations. Sorry if that wasn’t clear, not my primary language.
A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more.
This is not federation anymore, but an entirely different architecture. Nostr works like this, but it also has its flaws.
What flaws?
-
Your key is your identity. If it’s lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.
-
Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub
-
Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.
-
(not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis
-
Looks more like you are interested in more influence power, and control for yourself.
What qualifies you to be in a leadership position that directly affects content control?
Your instances are not being used the way you wanted, so you propose structural and organizational changes that, suprise, benefit your administrative influence from your instances.
You’re so focused on the details of your solution, you don’t seem to be holding or acknowledging any objective perspectives.
benefit your administrative influence from your instances
They are not going to be “my” instances.
acknowledging any objective perspectives.
Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.
I don’t need/want to make money out of these instances, I am just commoditizing the complements.
I think this idea is good. I remember seeing those domain names last year. At the time it seemed muddy and uncomfortable to me, since there was a whole scheme of Reddit ghost accounts posting, while I understood there were good intentions behind it, mirrored posts were flooding users’ All feed to the point I started blocking a bunch of subs, and many admins defederated.
If we can promote the community first approach where the domain is the space for discussion to be held and stored, with users connecting from across the Fediverse, this would be excellent, a good alternative to massive centralized Lemmy servers. Collective ownership would ensure preservation of content if one or more go offline.
ITT: People who don’t understand IAM or how to build a healthy federated structure. There should be identity services and instances just to host content separately. This way a spammer from a service won’t de-federate content from everyone else and there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
lol I think you are right about this. You’ll never get these lemmitors to see it i guess.
there could be easier moderation splitting the task between users and the comms.
On the other hand, for some communities moderation of the communities and the members are specific and should not be generalized.
Beehaw is an example that comes to mind, lemmy.ml as well
Even though the community is contained the cloud resources should still be split in two between identity and operations to be in alignment with all the industry best practices and potential for scalability. Remember the unix philosophy is do one thing well.
Beehaw should operate their own Beehaw fediverse IDP (Identity provider) for the users to sign in with, that would manage their tos agreements, privacy policies and user based security. Separately they should operate their Lemmy server which hosts pictures and links organized by communities. They could just use a single IDP for their instance and have the same experience as now only better with better architecture.
Source: I am a cloud services architect.
I’m familiar with IAM concepts, and indeed having a separate IdP and content instances would be a better architecture.
However the reality is that the platforms (Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed) are being developed by very small teams (Piefed is a 2 or 3 people team, and Lemmy might be around 5).
Lemmy is focusing on features delivery (https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy), which could help the platform grow more than a new IAM architecture.
There will probably be a point in time where performance will require a rework, but at the moment, it does not seem to be a priority
But nothing needs to be done to meet this OPs desires for community only instances that are well federated with other instances (IE at least one user is subscribed to each community on each instance). This way those admins just manage those communities and Beehaw and Lemmy.ml can run their combined servers.
The users and the subscribed to communities cause nearly all the load on the servers too, it is a way to keep costs down.
Who would manage all of those community instances?
The current setup works well with the limited number of admins and mods we have overall. I’m regularly looking for mods on communities I mod, there isn’t so many of them (e.g. !showsandmovies@lemm.ee )
Also, with the federation currently being broken, mods would need to have an account on each community to be able to get the reports: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4744
Regarding costs, the cost of these community instances suggested by OP is around 6500€ per year, so 540€ per month (https://lemmy.world/comment/12595221)
It currently costs 80€ per month to host lemmy.ml, which is the 4th most active instance with 2300 monthly active users
I mean that is what is is asking, he is looking for a team of people to manage the instances in this post. That is what this post is about, he is looking for a team of people to run them as admins while maintaining his (imo correct) vision for how it should be structured.
I forgot to mention the biggest fact- the users are where all the risk are. If people are just posting pictures to your instance of communities you have minimized risk as you can just gatekeep what is posted. Once you allow users in who can then post on other federated communities you take on a lot more risk.
They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.
Have you considered it’s because of this?:
My only requirement: these instances should remain closed for registrations and used only to create communities.
I wouldn’t run an instance that didn’t allow users to sign up as it would impede growth and uptake.
It also would have the interesting effect of pushing a lot of the load onto other instances, which doesn’t seem true to the Fediverse spirit.
Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.
I think this makes a lot of sense. We don’t want the instance hosting, say, football communities to be defederated anywhere on account of its users behaving poorly. In general there’s just no reasons to have the users in the same place as the community.
Objection! Hehe… No, wait. Really, I see a problem…
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea. And, even if you were to open registrations only for mods, we would have only moved the inconvenience to this (who wants to have so many accounts, really?)
There’s also the problem with centralization of domain names under you. I don’t know you, and perhaps you’re well intended… So, it’s fine for the most part, let’s just assume that’s okay. Now, what happens if you had an accident or decided to go live in a farm? Without domain name renewals, etc. all communities would be in trouble. There’s centralization in the shape of a single point of failure.
I can’t see this happening even if the domain names are cool.
And, leaving disadvantages aside. What’s the point on this? Can you name any advantage?? I agree that it would be more ordered and I like that. But it’s quite subjective, and hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…
Thanks for the intentions. Let’s focus on some new ideas, they’ll come…
If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.
It wouldn’t be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.
centralization of domain names under you.
The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.
Can you name any advantage??
- Less concerns about political fights among “user” instances affecting communication among communities
- Less tribalism regarding “what community is the canonical one”. Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think “ok, that one will be a good entry point”.
- Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
- Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.
hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…
As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.
I was the only one who could create communities on them.
Typically the only one who can create magazines/communities are local users of the instance. With registration closed, that means only you (or the new instance owner) would be able to do this.
Though one can get around this with some bot magic ( lemmit.online had a magazine that was dedicated to new sub/magazine requests - once someone made the request, the bot would create and own the magazine but add the requestor as the moderator )
Do you intend to have open magazine creation on these instances or would that still be restricted to the owners of the consortium?
My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).
