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

sanitation@lemmy.today

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 https://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 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 https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ and https://lemmy.radio/ and https://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.

sirhaxalot@nord.pub

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them and solution being - just banning me and removing all my data.

This is kind of an architectural problem with Lemmy and PieFed at the moment tbh. Not everything is federated, just the post and comments. If the post is an image, the instance you post from is going to have to serve that image to all users of the Fediverse (though at least other instances sometimes cache thumbnails). Depending on bandwidth I could easily see someone posting a lot of popular memes and other image posts requiring a lot of bandwidth, which may cost a decent amount of money, or cause the instance to reach traffic limits, depending on hosting.

xyro@morbier.foo

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.

sanitation@lemmy.today

yeah it seems like media is just lmited to 5Mb.

I cant upload most of the videos it seems or even larger gif files

sanitation@lemmy.today

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.

xyro@morbier.foo

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.

sanitation@lemmy.today

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 after 10 posts)
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.

maeve@lemmygrad.ml

The idea isn't wrong, the reasoning for it is selfish af.

kierunkowy74@piefed.zip

Limited form of this is already used by PieFed instance chooser. Stability is calculated basing on number of admins with emergency access, non-admins paying enough for hosting and having automated daily backups.

dxnny801@lemmy.zip

Lol I don't care if my "contributions" disappear. It's Lemmy...

sanitation@lemmy.today

I know many people see it this way - where basically lemmy data is temporary.
"ephemeral lemmy instances" is what they are

fastfinge@rblind.com

This is a problem with Lemmy on the admin side. I set up retention, and any post here is automatically deleted if it's more than a year old and nobody has interacted with it. But I had to write a lot of custom scripting to handle that, and it still screws up: I was somehow counting profile photos as posts, deciding they got no interaction, then deleting everyone's profile photos. I fixed it, of course, but that isn't something admins should have to handle from scratch, by hand, on every server. No instance owner can afford to store everything, forever, for free, for users. Especially in this market where memory and hard drives are soon going to cost as much as my house. This instance is funded entirely by me, at about $200 per month, located in a Canadian data center. But $200 is a hard cap; I need to find ways to ensure we stay within that monthly amount, or try and raise money from a collection of my fellow blind users, who likely have nothing to spare. This isn't a beg post, just trying to give you insight into the realities of instance hosting. Right now Lemmy expects that all admins are okay with media and database storage that expands for ever and ever, infinitely. Most of us are not. Meaning that if we're technical enough, we can write our own custom solutions to handle it. Or if we're not, our only recourse is banning users to force Lemmy to delete whatever's filling the disc.

I'm a well federated instance, so I guess I could make a contract to sell all the data I get to an AI provider, and that would allow me to afford to store everything forever. But I'm not willing to do that, and I suspect if I tried every other instance would defederate us anyway.

carl@anarchist.nexus

The lack of tagging on OP’s account has been the biggest reason I considered blocking them. I don’t mind reposters, but tag your shit so people who don’t want it can filter it. I quickly gave them a bright red user tag instead. So I can at least see at a glance when a post is from them, to then decide if I want to engage.

Especially when a lot of their posts have been old Reddit content, (often from several years ago) which was clearly just meant to grab attention. Their posts always felt like the “tales from reddit” types of YouTube channels, where someone just reads Reddit posts verbatim and adds a few quips as “content”.

eldavi@lemmy.ml

make sense -- a huge majority of lemmy seems to be running on hamster wheels of geriatric hamsters. lol

carl@anarchist.nexus

Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you "look like a bot."

I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

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.

I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

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 )

I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they're trusting with years of their content.

Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.

mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works

I was somehow counting profile photos as posts, deciding they got no interaction, then deleting everyone's profile photos. I fixed it, of course, but that isn't something admins should have to handle from scratch, by hand, on every server

Since you already put in the work do develop the script, have you considered upstreaming it and/or releasing publicly?

joyo@lemmy.ml

This is a problem on the entire fedi, not just lemmy.

Host the media yourself, it's easy.

papaskwat@lemmy.today

Exactly why I host my own. Not under this username though, because I'd get defed'd by most of Lemmy. LOL My stalkers don't know my instance name or username there because it doesn't interact with this username at all. haha

Everyone should own their own. To be clear tho, mine is totally a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers. But I only have 6 active users and I won't allow more, so all good!

papaskwat@lemmy.today

Thanks for all you do. I appreciate your efforts!

sanitation@lemmy.today

Some of us consider [data disappearing] a good thing.

I love to have privacy. I hate when im forcible deplatformed and decontented. hate hate it.

Choosing to delete your data is privacy. Losing it because an admin had no working backup is data loss.
Those are completely different things.
If you want to burn your account every year, great. But someone else may have spent five years writing troubleshooting guides, moderating a community, or building useful discussions. They should be able to expect their home instance to have a backup.

I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content.

I created two new accounts and both were banned after roughly 10 posts overnight. No warning. No "hey, are you automating this?" No request to slow down or tag the account. Just assumption --> bot/spam -> ban.

Note that reddit does not do that. post as much as the fuck you want. Imagine new lemmy user doing this and just getting banned. wth. resson for 35k MAU

I haven't personally experienced any file size limits

External hosting isn't a substitute for local media hosting. Hotlinking gets blocked all the time, URLs expire or posts get removed. Authentication gets added. Hosts disappear. HTTP headers and referrer policies break embeds. Some major platforms deliberately make direct linking difficult.

If I want media attached to a post to remain available, the reliable option is for the instance to actually host a copy., 5 MB is tiny for modern media.

Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans?

hell No. Obviously if someone posts CSAM, malware, threats, or other illegal content, remove it and ban them.

I'm talking about proportionality.

If somebody has contributed hundreds of legitimate posts for months and then an admin decides their posting volume is too expensive, banning the account and wiping everything they've contributed is insane infrastructure management.

And on the other extreme, I had brand-new accounts banned after around 10 posts simply because admins apparently decided they looked like bots.

There's a gigantic spectrum between "do nothing" and "nuke the account."

not even a warning? not even a pm? ffs really? Rate-limit them. Remove the offending posts. Temporarily suspend them. Communicate.

A ban system existing doesn't mean every problem requires the maximum penalty.

I don't concern myself with who can see my posts.

up to you, you are you. federation is a social network. Most people posting to communities presumably want other people to see and interact with what they post.

An entire instance suddenly becoming unable to interact with another instance is absolutely relevant to those users.

"content" is ephemeral. What are you actually losing?

Potentially years of knowledge.

You actually gave the perfect example yourself: that obscure six-year-old troubleshooting post that solves somebody's problem.

Today's shitpost is disposable. Today's detailed technical answer might be somebody's Google result five years from now.

The whole point I'm making is that users should get to decide what's disposable, not discover that their instance admin decided it for them by never setting up backups.

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

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