hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.
i’m infinitely grateful that all of you have decided to join us here, and the community has had very few issues with moderation or general unpleasantness to this point. i’m also been greatly appreciative of the support this community has already given us both financially and with your time and energy in keeping the site up and well tuned.
with that said: please temper your expectations of what is technically possible with the website and be patient about what is. there are literally thousands of you to accommodate now, and a finite number of hours to do it with.
more specifically: we (the Admins) are four people, only two of which have actual experience running or maintaining anything in the same universe of what we’re managing now. we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities. Lemmy itself has very limited base functionalities, many of which we’re trying to work around or with and constrain us in what we can do or how. a lot of options we have at our disposal to make stuff run are binary, and a lot of the not-binary options are confusing.
we’re sure this will get better eventually, but from that point follows this reality: we simply cannot currently (and may not in the future either, to be honest with you) accommodate a lot of what you might think we’re able to do, or expect because Reddit had it either through an app or the base function of the site. this software hasn’t had 15 years to mature in functionality and community addons like Reddit–and while it’s their full time gig, the upstream software is still maintained by just two people who also run the flagship instance here. they have a lot of shit on their plate too; we’re lucky they can even take time to get to our notes!
and that last point also brings us to a final thing to emphasize: this is not a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. i think doing this full time would be fucking miserable, personally, and i think i can speak for all of us in saying full-time working on this site is literally not something we can commit to. it has to be that way for this to be a solvent project.
if we split the balance of our donations equitably right now–all of which is site money, to be clear, we only use it for keeping the site online and paying for any labor we might source to someone else–that’d work out to just $500 per person, which is not even a week of compensation at a wage of $15/hr. collectively, we have probably put in well over full-time hours just to keep the site going this week, and we did that last week too. we expect we’ll be doing this all month. that splitting also wouldn’t account for our volunteers who do most of the technical stuff, who have probably put in even more hours than we have, and who i personally think would deserve compensation before we do. (our site would be kind of fucked without them right now.)
all this to say: please be mindful of whether what you’re asking of us is even possible. we are trying really hard here and it’s not like a lot of what is brought up is invalid (i generally agree theoretically with a lot of what people have been bringing to us), but at least during our influx we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values”.
I have nothing I feel is of substance to say except a huge THANK YOU!
Thank you to everyone :
- Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
- Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
- Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
- Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit
There’s this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate “person who volunteers their own time” with “person who has to do anything I want them to do”. When stated that baldly it’s easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won’t fall into that trap.
Take care of yourselves. The beauty of this whole deal is its not “one” it’s “all” of us. All the servers, all the users. There really is no reason to jump on one instance and put strain on good people doing a good thing. So often, good folks tend to over extend themselves. I’ve seen it time and again. Spread out your accounts into those smaller instances. You can interact with all the content everywhere.
Be well beehaw.org admins and thank you.
Be wary if burn out! Take breaks, step away when needed. Having you guys still around in the future is more important than trying to compete with Reddit’s resources.
You’re managing fine as is already!
I remember Reddit early days… it had its bumps along the way.
I don’t expect much this early in. Y’all do it at your pace… I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
I can only promise that I respect you tons more than that Fuckface Apollo killer u/Spez!
thank you, it means the world to us :)
Absolutely incredible work to not have a server spontaneously shit the bed and catch fire.
well, about that… it “catches fire” about once an hour and it’s been interesting to try to automate problem resolution with scripts and clever rate limits. More on our uptime/SLA plans here: 📢 Buzzworthy SLA Announcement 🐝 (in !support by me)
I’m just grateful for what has already been done, there’s no rush :)
Thank you for your work !
I think that it’s great what you’ve done here so far and I wish you all the best in your efforts!
Just a thought; If things ever calm down and you’re so inclined to share, I would love a “lessons learned” type post from you and the team. You’re possibly some of the foremost experts in the world at operating a Lemmy instance at this point and those of us with micro-instances running on random corners of the fediverse could certainly benefit from your hard-earned wisdom.
Thanks so much for everything!
Expectations are set. Been here only a few days and i’m here for it. It’s been overall a great experience. Not just with functionality, but the atmosphere y’all have fostered. It works even with the quirks. I’m a firm believer in work life balance, so please, do what you must and stay sane. Really just saying thanks. I will support this however I can.
This is the kind of community I’ve wanted to be part of for a very long time. I would much, much rather experience some slowdown and a bug here and there than what I have been putting up with from Reddit for many years. The fact that not only is this instance still up and running, but you’ve been getting it to run smoothly more often than not despite this massive influx of traffic is incredible for just 4 people to accomplish.
It has to be stressful, and it has to be especially stressful getting an unprecedented number of requests from people who have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes. I hope that most of them are at least polite rather than demanding. All this is to say that I see you guys and I really appreciate the work that you’ve been putting in at such a critical time.
Really impressed with this place and how it’s run so far! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently taking advantage of a cross training programme to get passable at the infrastructure side of things. I’d be happy to donate a weekend or two here and there for the sake of BeeHaw if that’s any use to you? I can’t commit a huge amount of time at the moment but I really like this community and I’ll contribute where I can if it’ll help keep the lights on.
What are the main pain points with Lemmy’s backend? I’ll dive into the code when I get some time and have a poke around to get familiar if nothing else.
I think the attempt to build a culture-first community is really cool and thank y’all for your time and energy! <3
This is impressive thus far. Keep up the good work!
For anyone who hasn’t had any experience running a server of any kind, it can be a lot of work. I’ve run Minecraft servers for my friends, first on hosted services, and then out of my basement. For like 5-10 friends. There were times I was giving up my entire weekend to get the MC server updated, research, get plugins and mods working, speaking with support people, and attempting to fix it all when it broke. When we were using hosted solutions, we technically split the cost, but every month I still had to go around semi-begging for donations (we were a bunch of poor college students/new grads). When I started hosting out of my basement, I bought the computer to run it. It was inexpensive, but still money entirely out of my own pocket.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
we’ve gone from running this on a potato to running it on something actually respectable, and also from ~$12/mo hosting costs to a baseline of around $100
To me, that’s the entire point of lemmy. You guys are doing what you want, and letting the rest of us play in your sandbox. It’s on us to play nicely, bring our own pails, and not poop in the sand.
You guys here, and at all of the instances I’ve run across, have gone out of your way to give us r/efugees a landing pad. I’ve received nothing but welcoming assistance at every turn, even when I’ve vented about the learning curve . What more could I ask for?
Absolutely we’re just happy to be here. You mentioned you have some volunteers that help out on the technical stuff. With the influx of users are you looking for more volunteers? I am sure most of us are still getting used to how everything works but I would imagine that’s not the case for everyone.
technical expertise and ability to moderate are the two big areas of volunteer support we have in the very immediate term
I’m still figuring out how to properly navigate lemmy in general, so I’m a week or two from being ready to moderate more than the “emergency” sub me and an fellow user set up for edc. But once I get more settled in, I’ll volunteer :)
don’t think the technical/backend admin team would scale well at the moment, but moderation is probably a huge time sink where you can help more efficiently right now. alyaza already posted the application form for moderators.