I’m a reddit refugee considering spinning up a lemmy instance. I’ve always been a lurker and I want to be more active in this new community. My biggest deterrent in starting an instance and adding some communities (I know I don’t have to have communities on an instance, but I want to!) is moderating users and posts. How much time does it take? How often do trolls need to be dealt with? What are the other things I’m not thinking about? Am I overthinking this?
Not much. You don’t have to be online all day every day. Lemmy is still relatively new, and not as crowded as Reddit, so you will be able to take your time, grow and get used to things along with your community. Besides, you can always accept other moderators to make your work easier as need be. You can go about it however convenient for you, and it’s not like people will complain for having 3-4 mods in a 2k community. Take your time. Build it and they shall come!
Moderating this community and the YSK one, for example, takes about three to four hours a day total(occasionally checking total), but that’s only because I also like to lurk and follow suggestions as the community is new.
In regards to dealing with trolls, I don’t think you have to worry about that right now. Lemmy is largely non-toxic at the moment, and if you do come across trolls, you’ll see that it doesn’t happen very often. I’ve seen none so far.
Thank you, that’s very reassuring. I’ll spin something up this weekend to try it out.
No worries, and good luck! I hope everything goes as you wish.
How does the storage aspect of it work? I’m not too familiar with the whole federation thing. Is it taking up local storage on whatever machine you host it on?
Do you mean the community? It’s hosted on lemmy.world, which (I think) is kept up via donations.