opinion: lemmy instances - should disclose basic hardware and infrastructure in "about" section. Most lemmy instances cant afford to have non-text users

When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you’re trusting somebody else’s infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.

If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.

Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I’m trusting.

Is this running on:

• A $5 VPS?
• A dedicated server with redundant storage?
• Someone’s mini PC under their desk?
• AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
• A database with proper backups?
• A server with no backups at all?

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them. Their solution was - just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx lemmy.radio.

That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)

If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying enterprise hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load? Do you even have a plan my friends?

I don’t know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.

I’m not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.

Just put some basics in /about:

• Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc.
• Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM
• Storage: 2 TB NVMe
• Backups: Daily, retained 30 days
• Media backups: Yes / No
• Off-site backups: Yes / No
• Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large
• Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.

That tells me infinitely more about whether I’m comfortable making an instance my home.

• Have admin(s) ever hosted any production software before? First time?
• are there even backups?
• Is there even any plans for scalability? What if your traffic goes 4x? what about 20x? do you have a plan beyond banning me and removing everythig I ever posted?
  And honestly, backups matter to same tune as CPU model.

Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.

But you can’t make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers.

Is that the reason why all lemmy instances dont let you upload more than 5Mb media? probably.

If you cant afford hosting costs - holy fuck, just stop fucking saying “everyone welcome” if you then going to ban those same “welcomed” people after they post 10 image memes (thx sopuli.xyz and lemmy.zip and lemmy.radio and lemmy.ml). no no - 👏you 👏 cant 👏 afford 👏 non-text 👏 users 👏, - instead you falsely accuse people of spamming and banning their accounts. No wonder lemmy is at 35k MAU. Hardware poor admins - you don’t even know what spamming is, you shouldn’t have kids users if you cant afford them, dont invite them in or just advertise your instances as text-only.

Hardware poor admins - stop inviting people. you have no capacity and only actively harming lemmy adoption.

There should be a list of such instances that should be inviting people at all.

Instance infrastructure shouldn’t be a mystery.

If you’re asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they’re building it on. You likely cant afford non-text users anyways.

Why not host your own if you’re gonna repost all Reddit posts as your own ?

It’s understandable that if you spam you’ll most likely get banned. If you want to do that, no problem, but do it on your own hardware.

I genuinely considering this. I would have already built couple servers and shipped to a colo if this was 2025. but stupid AI really messed up this market and I dont want another single server setup.

It’s understandable that if you spam you’ll most likely get banned.

I think people on lemmy have completely lost the meaning of the word spam. Spam isn’t “someone posts more often than I personally like.” Spam is mostly unwanted stuff, ads - Viagra ads, affiliate links, scams, or the same garbage repeatedly.

You can call it high-volume posting. You can dislike reposts. You can even say the volume is annoying.

But high-volume, relevant content isn’t automatically spam just because you don’t want to see it.

its not just me - lemmy stuck at 35k MAU.

I’m all in for using AI, but I don’t think peoples on Lemmy are interested in a copy of Reddit with only bot content, else they would not be there but on Reddit directly.

Acting as a RSS feed on Lemmy is low quality posting to get my attention, which I would consider spam (especially without the bot tag on the account)

tthis is much bigger than reposts. Lemmy has a pile of structural problems that make it hard for normal users to trust or stick with it:

• Instances have disappeared with user data because admins had no usable backups.
• You often have no idea if your home instance has proper backups or is one disk failure away from disappearing.
• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can’t even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.
• Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you “look like a bot.” No warning, no conversation, no chance to adjust. (honestly - seems to me they just dont have hosting money and thus have to ban everyone posting more than 10 posts a day) thanks sopuli.xyz and lemmy.zip for banning me after 10 posts
• Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )
• Quadruple moderation: community mods, home-instance admins, receiving-instance admins, plus a public modlog that follows you around. Most people just want to have fun - and moderation at every corner is not fun. Waay worse than even reddit which bans for other reasons. (thanks sopuli.xyz and lemmy.zip for banning me new accounts after 10 posts - everyone welcom you say? stop saying that, admit you have no hosting money)
• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.
• Many instances have no sustainable funding model and admins personally eat the hosting costs. I think it comes down to this - they ban you because they have no money on hosting, they should just frigging say so.
• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they’re trusting with years of their content.

And then we’re obsessing over whether bringing filtered, highly rated content from elsewhere is going to destroy Lemmy.

^ I really don think me posting content is the problem. Anoter big problem is - lemmy cant afford to have it.

Lemmy is sitting around 35k MAU. Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re making it too easy to participate.

Data loss, tiny media limits, fragile hosting, instant bans, quadruple moderation, empty communities, and no meaningful appeals process.

There’s a lot more standing between Lemmy and mainstream adoption than somebody reposting a meme from Reddit.

You’re asking a lot to the admin of a (free) instance to comply with your needs. Most of the issues you mention disappear if you host you own instance, you can set your own rate limit, control your backups and decide what you accept or not on your instance.

Specifically on the limit for images, lemmy-pictr is my highest ressource consumer, so I can understand why admins of public instance would put limits.

see issue is - most non techie people wont even understand why they being banned. thats the problem. me running my own instance solves issue for me, does nothing for others.