Don't make the same mistake reddit did, by assuming active users = engagement.

Look at reddit's stats, active users didn't drop very drastically when everyone left. However, engagement/comments dropped drastically.

Was a contractor for Walmart.

Got hired on as a lead dev, getting compensated 150k/yr.

2nd day, they told me I needed to switch contracts in order to stay on. New contract paid 50k salary.. with lots of required OT.

But, it's OK they said, you get benefits and PTO.

Fuck that.

Guess, I am out of the loop.

After Linus blasted people using ad-blockers (fucking hypocrite), I uh, just blocked his channel.

yea... every modern IDE makes it extremely obvious of the unicode character.....

SO.... yea...

If you really wanted to be evil, zero-width space is the worst.

https://symbl.cc/en/200B/

You don't see it.

I mean... as a software developer, Sorry, I will not be returning to the office.

You need me, more than I need you. The market is HOT right now.

Companies will learn, the hard way.

As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive....

Honestly, nothing.

The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn't going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.

I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.

With that said,

Basically everything else is downsides.

Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.

PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren't uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.

Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @ruud@lemmy.world doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn't constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)

And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don't really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.

There isn't an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances.... through lemmy itself.

On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.

Here are the incoming stats, from my "small" instance.

In terms of outgoing, it's very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.

tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.

Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.

Honestly.

Stackoverflow is a horrible place to ask anything.

I have had 100% legit, well documented questions, closed as duplicate of unrelated other question.

Its... honestly, just not a friendly place to go. Full of a bunch of assholes....

Most of the answers actually suck too. Many times, you will find the correct answer downvoted, and incorrect or bad answers upvoted.

I give credit to the verge- They have been doing a fantastic job of grabbing the details for the current reddit issues, and doing a fine job of reporting in a non-clickbaity way.

Nah, fuck that.

Until reddit releases their IPO, all attempts at "peace" are secretly just trying to keep the boat floating

Sigh....

All of those ideas are bad.

1. Captchas are already pretty weak to combat bots. It's why recaptcha and others were invented. The people who run bots, spend lots of money for their bots to.... bot. They have accessed to quite advanced modules for decoding captchas. As well, they pay kids in india and africa pennies to just create accounts on websites.

I am not saying captchas are completely useless, they do block the lowest hanging fruit currently. That- being most of the script kiddies.

2. Email domain filters.

Issue number one, has already been covered below/above by others. You can use a single gmail account, to basically register an unlimited number of accounts.

Issue number two. Spammers LOVE to use office 365 for spamming. Most of the spam I find, actually comes from *.onmicrosoft.com inboxes. its quick for them to spin it up on a trial, and by the time the trial is over, they have moved to another inbox.

3. Autoblocking federation for servers who don't follow the above two broken rules

This is how you destroy the platform. When you block legitimate users, the users will think the platform is broken. Because, none of their comments are working. They can't see posts properly.

They don't know this is due to admins defederating servers. All they see, is broken content.

At this time, your best option is for admin approvals, combined with keeping tabs on users.

If you notice an instance is offering spammers. Lets- use my instance for example- I have my contact information right on the side-bar, If you notice there is spam, WORK WITH US, and we will help resolve this issue.

I review my reports. I review spam on my instance. None of us are going to be perfect.

There are very intelligent people who make lots of money creating "bots" and "spam". NOBODY is going to stop all of it.

The only way to resolve this, is to work together, to identify problems, and take action.

Nuking every server that doesn't have captcha enabled, is just going to piss off the users, and ruin this movement.

One possible thing that might help-

Is just to be able to have an easy listing of registered users in a server. I noticed- that actually... doesn't appear to be easily accessible, without hitting rest apis or querying the database.

It doesn't.

If you are on my instance, for example, its hosted out of my own pocket.

I have a TON of spare compute resources laying around, and I am more than happy to donate them to this cause.

Edit- lets also be perfectly honest- hosting lemmy costs FAR less then it costs me to host plex for friends/family.

{ "type": "comment response", "message", "I too, am certainly a human, and not a robot"}