This was taken on a cruise on a rare day when the sun came out and I could watch the sun set -- at 11pm. :D
I figured I'd post just a short trip report for a Sand Hollow trip in Utah that we did last weekend.
The forecast we super hot for both days (over 100 degrees) so we decided to go in the morning.
We ran Milts Mile on Saturday. That was a really fun trail, but it claimed my passenger-side hub knob. I was able to scoot up middle monkey (which was hella steep but surprisingly not too scary).
The off-camber stuff scared me the most. In the photo above, this section of rock had me in my head so much that I stopped and my spotter and to jump out and assure me the passenger tire was still on the ground.
I don't have sway bars at all (with plans to fix that) so I get tons of body roll.
On Sunday, we ran Ridgeline and the first part of West Rim trail. My wife drove that day and had zero problems with the initial shelves and rocky climb on Ridgeline.
She was able to take the "fun" lines at the Funnel and Steps as well.
What blew me away is she managed to drive up Toll Booth #1. I didn't want to try and drive it because I was worried about the amount of body roll my XJ has, but she wanted to give it a shot, and boy did she ever.
Finally, we hit Top of the World - snagged the photo, and left via the Water Tank "road".
We've got another weekend trip planned in November and we can't wait to go back!
Recently took a cruise to alaska and the weather cleared up a bit in time for sunset.
I've got an ARB awning tent that packs relatively compact and light that I use for camping when wheeling. Works super well for me and my dogs (or whoever's with me).
Was at my parent's house in cool weather and we were able to play fetch until she was completely exhausted. Then we had BBQ haha.
Long term, I agree -- the whole point of the fediverse is to distribute the user base, moderation capacity, etc. Initially though, we're just trying to make it as easy as possible to for folks to discover lemmy and use it.
Sending them on a wild goose chase to find an instance and sign up complicates that. Getting them to come back the next day is also way harder when that experience sucks.
If folks can sign up on your instance and use it as their gateway to the lemmy fediverse, its tremendously helpful for distributing load.
The challenge is, letting people know your instance exists, and when they finally do and you get 30 signups per hour, scaling your instance to keep up.
Long term, you also have to deal with all the sysadmin crap (scaling up/down based on load, security and updates, backups, assholes that DDOS your instance because they don't like your moderation decisions, copyright take downs, legal requests, etc).
Yeah - its tricky. What I'm seeing though is instead of communicating that need at all, lemmy.ml and potentially other instance owners are just trying to push new users to smaller instances.
I am running my own mastodon instance in my basement - I've got other personal projects running in AWS, and work professionally in Azure. It sounds like you've got some great cloud experience as well. There seem to be lots of other similarly skilled folks here that can assist with deployment and scale automation (if that's what they need), or others that could assist by just signing up for $5/month on patreon to cover server costs. That call to action needs to happen though or else people wont do anything.
A pinned post like "Welcome to Lemmy!" on Lemmy.ml and other instances with that link would help I think. Also, I think it would be a more streamlined experience (and less disorienting) if the "Join" links on that page went directly to the instance's signup page instead of the local instance feed.
I agree -- the FOMO thing is real.
However having a clear path to follow would really help capture/retain those users. In other words "Wow, Lemmy is so popular it can't handle the traffic -- here's an up-to-date list of instances to try anyway", or some other option.
Possibly a pinned post where instance owners can comment info on their own instances without having to wait for someone to update a master list?
Mastodon during the twitter migration had a problem where folks were standing up instances, but new users were having trouble finding them, or overwhelmed with lots of "interest-based" instances. Most users don't care about a "furry" specific instance, or an instance focused on San Francisco Donut enthusiasts. They just want an instance.
Another problem is as time went on, some of those instances shut down abruptly and wiped out accounts for folks. Having a few centralized and supported instances at first will help solve that problem as well.
I have the technical know how, given a "GettingStarted.md" file to read to stand up an instance, but I'd rather put my time/energy into supporting an existing one. Dealing with the horde of people currently joining and about to join will require some coordination.
I'm super new to this and still trying to learn stuff. Looks like folks can pin posts to the instance. Something like a "New to Lemmy? Start Here." kind of post would be helpful. Right now, I just saw the "lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead" and wondered if I was in the wrong place.
Yeah -- its gonna be a while. Gonna post in some of the ones that do exist and see if I can help develop them.
Was gonna say... this sunset is pretty outstanding.... then noticed it was night time. Awesome shot... unfortunate for the park though. I also wanted to say, I follow your IG -- I love your photos. I hope you keep posting here.
I love the colors. Outstanding shot.
/r/welding /r/machinists /r/cherokeexj /r/jeep made it though (and some wrangler community... so, yay?)
Haha wow. What an effective way to describe it.