Unfortunately this lemmy site will be closing at the end of November.
The reason for this is I no longer believe several design choices have actually come to fruition with regards to how lemmy and the fediverse works. While other fediverse projects may work, I personally dont really see Lemmy as a frontrunner to bring a successful alternative to other similar projects such as reddit.
The main issues revolve around human behaviour - the top 20 lemmy sites account for most of the traffic. Users simply do not want to join smaller lemmy servers to spread the load in any meaningful way. So smaller lemmy sites such as my own have just a handful of daily users that could just move to one of the top 20 sites with no real issues effectively. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
There seems to be no downside to this as the last 3 years have proven that being on a bigger or smaller lemmy site is basically irrelevant.
The other issue is lemmys population is waning. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48 The number of monthly users is dwindling- now under a 750k a month and still falling - so the project itself is not even popular among users. Compare this to Mastadon which is growing - not shrinking. If people do not like the project then I do not feel invested in continuing to run it. I would rather spend the money in a different more popular and useful open source project.
For these basic reasons the decision is made and users are asked to migrate away by December to another project. There will be no further updates or maintenance to this server as a result.
Kind regards -P
Registration to this server had been changed to closed.
Hi,
Of course you or anyone else can take over the various services. It costs the following:
Contabo hosting (single vps) : USD 30 per month iDrive object storage : USD 60 per year
Domain I own and use so will continue to pay. Email is done via a freemium service (mailjet) - 200 emails per day.
Maintenance requires docker updates, snapshotting server prior to work, checking backup scripts run (also go to idrive with a retention bucket) and managing cloudflare account to prevent excessive bots and so on.
You would basically be on the hook to budget around $50 a month to ensure nothing ever happens and your time. It basically runs itself except for upgrades and requires no maintenance or intervention between versions as everything is tweaked to be within set limits (cpu, memory and so on), and configured to work without ever logging on. For example I only ever log on to update the server and then reboot it and occasionally do apt-get upgrades when I feel like it. Cloudflare does all the protection automatically and you cant directly access the lemmy web interface via ip - the firewall rules are locked to cloudflares IP range only and proxied by them.
That all said, Im not actually going anywhere, I just dont see any value in ~$50 going towards this project vs some other open source project as its never performed as developers of Lemmy projected or promised. I have given them three years to sort themselves out. I feel that was enough and now someone more worthy can take on the expectations I have for projects such as these.
Let me know if this interests you or not, but someone has to be prepared to foot a bill for a server end of the day if they believe in it and want it.
P