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.

MAU is a number that matters to corporations and advertisers. No one running a Lemmy server is either of these so that metric isn’t really useful or say anything.

Lemmy has been going for 6 years now and it is still new. It isn’t even version 1.0. Success in Lemmy is not what you think it is. The most successful Lemmy server is Hexbear because it stands alone and is growing the community they want.

MAU measures whether people actually use the platform.

And Reddit has spent those six years practically begging users to leave:

• Killed third-party apps
• Locked down its API
• Pushed logins and the official app
• Increased ads
• Monetized user data
• Pissed off moderators and communities

Yet Lemmy is still around 35k MAU.

At some point “we’re still new” isn’t an excuse. Your biggest competitor keeps shooting itself in the foot and you’re still not growing. its not working chief

Lemmy doesn’t have any competitors, it isn’t competing. It isn’t what you think it is. You are still using a corporate framing for a non corporate system. There is no company, there is no manger, there is no goal. This measurement is only to say 35k people are using it now, but it doesn’t matter is my entire point. “Lemmy” is a federated network for enthusiasts with no corporate direction that is still in early development. There is no competitor, growth isn’t the purpose of it, it is software made by communists.

Jesus Christ, everyone here seems to have invented their own definition of what Lemmy is.

Lemmy doesn’t have competitors. It isn’t competing. It isn’t what you think it is.

Except the actual Lemmy developers describe it as:

“a decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators”

They’ve been calling it a Reddit alternative since at least 2020.

So no, I’m not imposing some imaginary “corporate framing” onto Lemmy. I’m using basically the same framing its own developers used to explain why they built it.

And “there is no manager or corporate goal” doesn’t mean adoption suddenly becomes meaningless. If you’re building an alternative to corporate-controlled link aggregators, whether anybody actually adopts the alternative fucking matters.

Otherwise what are we celebrating? Software existing?

And that’s why 35k MAU matters to me. Reddit has spent years handing alternatives opportunities on a silver platter, and Lemmy hasn’t capitalized on them.

You can personally define success as “35k enthusiasts are happy.” Fine.

But stop pretending your definition of Lemmy is the official one while telling everyone else “you don’t understand what Lemmy is.” Even the developers explicitly called it a Reddit alternative.

github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you’re interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

It is an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.