A lot of you are new to Lemmy and the fediverse. You might have some questions about it, about me, or about discuss.online and it’s sister site utter.online.

Ask me anything. I’ll be watching this thread all day today: June 30th, 2023.

  • ds12
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    21 year ago

    Originally came across your instance from a discussion around mod tools!

    What was the inspiration for your instance name? I think it really matches the thread feature of Lemmy and what it entails!

    How has your experience been setting up and managing your Lemmy instance? Have you also been experiencing an influx of new users?

    What are some things you might suggest new Lemmy users to watch out for on the Fediverse? And cool things to note and try using?

    Thanks for hosting this AMA! =)

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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      21 year ago

      I’ve been planning out a FOSS solution for mod tools for a few weeks now. I’m releasing the design document this weekend and hope to break ground with the community on it. That’s great that you’re involved!

      I spent about an hour just looking at names for an online community. I saw a bunch of other Lemmy instances with names that didn’t feel inviting. I was really pushing for something that was easy to say, remember, and engage. I had a lot of different ideas and subdomain hacks to try to find something like that. This was one of the final 5 I liked and ultimately picked it because I was also able to get utter.online for Mastodon. I thought they made a great team.

      I have 15 years of development and sysops experience. Setting it up was more of a fun project for me. I started small with single server and then I kept saying… well what if I? Eventually, I built a pretty resilient infrastructure. I wanted there to be close to zero downtime and a snappy experience for users. I’m somewhat limited by how Lemmy is built for each of those goals; however, this is all changing as the project quickly picks up speed with the influx.

      I’ve not seen an influx. The biggest move was when the /r/nerf subreddit migrated to my instance to c/nerf. Even that wasn’t enough to push the servers. I had built for a deluge. One problem with how Lemmy instance descovery works is they list the business ones on the top of the instance page. People naturally join those first creating a huge gap between small and large instances. If you didn’t get a rush of people early you’re somewhat in trouble to grow. I’ve been trying a lot of things to try to get traffic here. Speaking with the other admins, a lot of traffic is both a blessing and a curse due to moderation and server cost. (You cannot monetize Lemmy with ads or subscriptions, you must rely on donations).

      Lemmy & the fediverse are a passion of mine. I thought of doing this about 8 years ago but didn’t think it would catch on. It probably wouldn’t of at that time. I have a somewhat similar social site I might actually finish that would go great with what’s currently available in the fediverse.

      It’s best to watch out for the “baddies”. There are instances full of them that might just rush new or growing instances. It’s a struggle as an admin to block and defederate on Lemmy & Mastodon. Keep an eye out and report when you’re suspicious.

      One great thing is that everything talks to each other. Signup for a Mastodon account and follow a Lemmy community. I have a special list on my Mastodon account to follow a set of groups. It find it easy to group subjects together.

      Thanks for all these great questions!

      • @kenvald
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        11 year ago

        I’ve been trying a lot of things to try to get traffic here.

        Would you mind sharing some of the things you have tried? Since there now are a couple of settled “main” instances it seems real hard to grow organically as a smaller instance. Is there something we can do to help other than word of mouth or donate?

        • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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          21 year ago

          That’s all you can do. Sites rank higher when the users engage. So most of what I’ve been doing is attempting to attract people to create accounts on this instance while also trying to get them to engage. Engagement is only Posts and Comments.

          Things I’ve tried are:

          • Engaging in the Lemmy community
          • Engaging on Mastodon, Reddit, & Lemmy, in general, to let people know I exist
          • Trying to accommodate Moderators so that people want to build their communities here
          • I tried to get listed by the WAN show with a merch message… they didn’t show it.
          • I tried a Google Ads spot but it didn’t do well. I had over 20k views but only 8 clicks. I’m redoing the ad. It’s awaiting approval.

          The best thing people can do is create communities and engage in them. Engagement is key. You get ranked by active users over the past 6 months. I have 259 users on this instance. ~140 are spam bots I banned. Of the remaining, only 46 have counted towards the engagement score.

  • @dosnelson
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    21 year ago

    How do you plan to interact with moderators, short term and ideal? Short term is obviously how you’re planning to do this immediately with a shoestring budget. Long term would be if this turned into a platform that made some amount of money and allowed part-time employment. When thinking about plan to interact: do you intend to allow moderators to stay on if they are distasteful/rude, but still legal/not outright breaking rules?

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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      21 year ago

      Short-term, I’m building relationships, tools, and respect. I have a few moderators today with mixed experience. I’m hoping to learn how best to work with them. I have no idea if this will make any money. I’m paying out of pocket for it now.

      Regarding the long term: If it does grow, I’m not 100% sure I’d want moderation to be an FTE’s responsibility. The community creates the content and should own some responsibility to keep it within the rules. However, I would love to compensate Moderators for their time and investment. Of course, different regions have different laws. There may be the need for full-time people to help ensure we’re not liable.

      I’m doing this for fun and because I believe the internet belongs to the people. I’m not trying to be Reddit, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. I’m more in the mindset of WordPress.

      I’m still trying to figure out how to build this network, attract new traffic, and build all the tools. I hope that donations help cover the hard costs for now. Then later, my time is compensated for along with all the others that contributed.

      I hope this answers your questions.

  • noban
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    111 months ago

    @jgrim

    Sorry if this isn’t the right place to put this. Feel free to delete once you’ve seen it. I tried to verify email for account signup but got https warning when clicking the link:

    HTTPS-Only Mode Alert
    Secure Site Not Available

    You’ve enabled HTTPS-Only Mode for enhanced security, and a HTTPS version of url5922.discuss.online is not available.

    Learn More…
    What could be causing this?

    Most likely, the website simply does not support HTTPS.
    It’s also possible that an attacker is involved. If you decide to visit the website, you should not enter any sensitive information like passwords, emails, or credit card details.
    
    

    If you continue, HTTPS-Only Mode will be turned off temporarily for this site.

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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      111 months ago

      No worries. I had trouble figuring out what the issue was. SendGrid was overwriting the links for link tracking. I’m not sure why they’re not working.

      I’ve disabled the SendGrid link tracking. I don’t even use it. I hope it works after that. But if you email me from your user account to hello@discuss.online I’ll enable your account. Just let me know your username.

  • @dosnelson
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    11 year ago

    Do you have any plans to support cryptocoin currencies for donations?

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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      1 year ago

      Maybe in the future. I don’t have any crypto accounts or know the first thing about how to start accepting it. However, I’ve been trying to think of ways to provide tip jars for moderators. Perhaps that would leverage it.

  • @dosnelson
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    11 year ago

    What is your resiliency setup? Are you entirely on DigitalOcean, or are you distributed across providers?

    • jgrim of SublinksOPMA
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      1 year ago

      Right now, I’m restricted due to funds. It’s already pretty expensive to operate. My current goal is no data loss. Outages are okay until I can afford not to allow it at all. Lemmy is also still at version 0.18. Not even at full release. Much is yet to be done to make Lemmy fully stable and allow for scaling. Currently, a single backend instance can only use a single database endpoint. It will grow and I will grow with demands and funds.

      I’ve considered making a replacement for Lemmy that acts the same if it grows enough. I’d love to be able to participate in the conversations but without some of the limits of a somewhat monolithic system. That would allow an instance to run one East Coast and one West Coast independently and keep in sync.


      My system is like this:

      1. Load balancer
      2. Two web front-ends (can scale more with growth)
      3. 3 Databases (one is for Lemmy, one for Failover, one for reads for moderation)
      4. 1 Backend server (doesn’t scale horizontally)
      5. 1 Image server (doesn’t scale horizontally)
      6. Object storage with DigitalOcean for images.
      7. Bastion server for connecting to resources
      8. Grafana server for running some custom moderation dashboards
      9. Loki server to store logs from all the other servers and report to Grafana
      10. Another web server running the wiki
      11. Another database running the wiki

      For utter.online you add:

      1. One server for the services
      2. One database with failover
      3. One redis server
      4. ObjectStorage

      Finally, I’m also running a Matrix server. This is currently hosting the admin channels for Lemmy’s admin community:

      1. One server
      2. One database with failover
      3. ObjectStorage

      A lot is running and to keep an eye on. It’s also not cheap. So in short… I’m gonna wait a bit to grow the infrastructure more.