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 from a racknerd black friday sale 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.
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 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.
Also - automation is not even fucking illegal on lemmy.world!!! do people not realize that?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, with regards to data control, lemmy is the worst of both worlds.
Because it’s federated, your posts will be out there. If you accidentally post something you didn’t mean to like doxing yourself, there is much less of chance to permanently delete your data compared to a centralised service (like reddit).