What do you think about having a regular State of Discuss.Online update?

  • Show some graphs of active users.
  • Assess the activity of communities.

Discuss

  • donations and costs
  • What’s new?
  • What’s planned?
  • Progress on ongoing things
  • jgrim of SublinksMA
    3•7 months ago

    I don’t track user behavior on here. I’m not sure what I’d do with those data. The communities are also very quiet here. Most of the activity is from the auto poster bot.

    Regarding donations & costs, I can certainly put something together. I should keep Opencollective updated with expenses; you can see it all there. I typically merge the expense of all the discuss.online services. Are you more interested in just the cost of the Lemmy instance? We also have the matrix server, pixelfed services, and Mastodon services.

    I could discuss how I’m attempting to lower costs here soon. I’ve been looking to cut the cost by sacrificing some disaster recovery and stability. I wanted to be the most stable instance; however, the roll of the dice hasn’t brought in major communities over, so it all seems to go to waste. We only have about 35 active users by the current census. We’ll see how that grows or changes, but that will drive some decisions regarding scaling down.

    There are some ongoing plans that I’m not ready to announce openly yet; it will be a significant change that will improve lots of things in the coming months. I’ve been working on some backend improvements and a new front-end. I can talk more about what’s coming in the coming weeks when things are more ironed out. It’s huge.

    • @ericjmorey
      OPEnglish
      3•7 months ago

      I think I gave the wrong impression about what I was proposing.

      I just think its a good idea to be transparent about what this instance is and is doing. It would certainly help with it being sustainable/reasonable from a funding expenses perspective.

      Some specifics that I left out of my original post:

      A) As a lemmy admin, you are tracking a lot in the instance database. Having a regular pull of summary information to see some patterns would be neat (and a subtle reminder to users that lemmy is anti-private by design, same as any ActivityPub service or public forum).

      B) Money flowing out vs money flowing in and projecting future flows is something I see other instances share in pretty reasonably prepared summaries without getting all CPA-minded about it. (BTW, OpenCollective is great for making the legal aspect of running not-for profit or social benefit oriented activities easy, but is absolutely horrible for its stated purpose of financial transparency)

      Some examples of good faith, decent presentation of financial transparency:

      C) Having the admins of an instance discuss what’s new and what’s changing and what they are excited about is part of community building. Having a template that can be followed can help ease that process for admins.

      D) Giving people a quick glance opportunity to see what the state of the instance is and see where it’s going and how it’s getting there can help get the instance where it intends to go.

      E) You’ve been pretty good at being open, but for people to see that they need to pay close attention to something that is inherently a casual activity. I think a regular update might make it easier for people to see your good work and efforts.