cross-posted from: lemmy.today/post/59442175

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 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 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 sopuli.xyz and lemmy.zip and lemmy.radio and 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.