I've decided to stick around for now to help out with Admin/server stuff, but everything has been fully transitioned over to them now.
as others of said, pretty sure it's an issue with the bigger instances struggling with the load, and/or software issues. similar to why it doesn't always work subscribing to lemmy.ml/lemmy.world communities from here. i don't think the federation from both of those places are working 100% either.
oh noooooooo I've been doxxed! 😂
Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?
I currently have a day job not related to this at all. I'm a software developer by day. I currently accept donations that go towards the hosting of this instance. The users so far have been very generous, so we have enough to carry us for around 6 months (from what I remember), based on current usage. As long as we don't get any huge spikes in usage (and i'm likely talking about in the thousands of new users joining), we should be ok for a while. If donations slow down I will be able to maintain the instance on my own, but ideally i'm hoping it can run off donations. I will be as transparent as I can be about this instances financials, as I plan on doing a monthly (maybe every other month?) "State of the Instance" type post, that I've seen done on mastodon, and some other lemmy instances too.
My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.
I have no plans to ever profit from this. All donations will 100% go towards our hosting costs. If, for whatever reason, this instances changes owners, I will transfer whatever donations are left over to the new owner as well.
If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.
Thank you! You can see from the donation link above how much we currently have. As I said earlier, we've had quite a few generous donors, so I'll let that up to you! I'll be adding my hosting expenses into opencollective as well so that will be visible too.
Hopefully I've answered most of your questions? If there's anything I've missed or if you have other questions, let me know!
hello! i'm the current owner & admin of lemmy.ca.
Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?
i don't really consider myself very policital, but I have taken those "vote compass" things just to see where I would fall, and i typically lean left. not sure exactly what you mean by easily influenced, but I would hope that I'm not. I think of myself as fairly level-headed, and probably overly analytical about things, and I typically don't try and let my emotions get involved in my decision making.
I have to run but can answer more questions if you'd like. or i can maybe do an AMA later?
yes, donations is my current plan.
someone mentioned in a different thread to contact CIRA and see if they will help like they did with mstdn.ca. I haven't yet looked into that yet.
this took me way too long to do, for what it is.
you're welcome! although i can't claim that the required new user application was my idea. early in the lemmy days everyone had open registrations and we used to get trolls that would register many accounts (it's rate limited now), and would post weird nazi-ish troll images, or a bunch of scat images, etc. the trolls also seemed to enjoy impersonating the two main devs as well, and it just got annoying so most instances decided to implement the registration applications, and i just followed along, and have kept it ever since.
and there's now some drama with two of the bigger instances with open registration too. sighs
anways, i think i've said it before but will review the whole registration application thing at some point. i know it's an annoying barrier, and we could probably have more users if it wasn't on, but i like to think that the user/content quality is higher because of it. at least that's what i'm telling myself!
Technically, if you post a picture from lemmy.ca to a different instance, the picture is stored on lemmy.ca's server, so yes, that would be against the rules, as that is what i'm trying to avoid.
I would say a general rule of thumb (as a lot of instances have similar rules, but they're probably enforced differently) that you try and follow the rules of both the instance you're posting from and the one your posting to. the community itself can have it's own set of rules too.
As to where the content itself is stored, technically, they're stored in both places. if you delete your account, i believe it gives you can option to delete all your content as well, and those deletes will be federated as well.
That being said, if one instance goes down, or an owner takes it down, or whatever, any content that has already been federated to other instances are already there, ie, stuff should still work, for the most part, with probably the exception being any images stored locally on the instance that is down, since images themselves don't federate across instances.
Also, a quick disclaimer, all of the above is all stuff that "i'm pretty sure on", haha, just from my understanding of how things work around here. If i'm wrong on anything, feel free to correct me!
currently, no, there's no way to turn this off unfortunately.
In the next lemmy release (0.18.0), it won't have this behavior, because they are getting rid of websockets, which is a performance bottleneck as well.
I'd prefer it if you don't renew until we figure something else out. I know they had plans to start a non profit but not sure where that's at. Sorry for the inconvenience.