Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
Well, I’m very explicitly not running it with the intent of it getting larger than maybe a couple dozen people I know who are interested. I’m not really interested in content moderation at any scale, let alone with random people I don’t know from the internet. (My most recent job was dealing with content & abuse for a large cloud provider, and I have zero interest in picking up shitpost babysitting if it’s avoidable.)
I’m otherwise going with the Mastodon Server Covenant as the basic guidelines: I’ve got a trusted friend I’m going to add as a 2nd admin, doing backups nightly, and at least a 90 day notice if/when I decide to stop hosting this.
I’d happily transfer the domain & data to anyone who wants to continue to admin it, or ask the community members what they want done.
I’ll admit that makes WAY less sense if I wanted to run an instance with thousands of users, but that’s very much not the goal.