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!

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.

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.

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.