It seems like Lemmy took off 2 years ago with the announcement of Reddit’s API blocking 3rd party apps. Many instances popped up, and some disappeared equally fast. More people have now moved over since the actual announcement becoming alive.
I’m a bit new to the decentralized hosts with federation/mesh social networks on the web, and are wondering if anyone with long time experience using something like Mastodon would shine a perspective on how these services usually operate? Does popular instances suddenly disappear, resulting in people losing contact with each other? losing progress, reputation, communities and their history? Since it’s open source, and it’s meant to be run by the people, for the people. How is the stability and long-term plan for Infosec.pub? I would like to stick around this service for hopefully many years.
Most of the instances in the instance section (https://infosec.pub/instances) is gone. I would be interested to see the statistics on how long all these instances lived before they were shut down, and compare those numbers to the big instances people are signing up to.
Lastly, there seems to be no way to migrate your account to another instance [1], so long-term reliability is indeed important.
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Heya, I’m the admin for infosec.pub, along with a bunch of other fediverse instances including infosec.exchange. I’ve been on the fediverse for a long time - infosec.exchange turns 8 next month, for example.
With each event that disenfranchises people (twitter bought by Musk, Reddit API, etc), I’ve seen a big surge in new instances. My observation is that many people get into running multi-user instances without really understanding what it takes, time-wise, emotionally, and financially.
Some of the software, like lemmy, but also kbin, calckey, and others, get pushed into the spotlight before they’re really in a reasonable spot to support the incoming community. Lemmy is relatively well functioning and complete, but only around a core set of use cases, whereas some of the others were just nowhere near ready.
I don’t know of anything on the lemmy roadmap to add account portability.
In any event, I’m here for the long term, though I do have to keep reminding our user base that this service is free to use, but not free to run, and therefore donations are much appreciated though not mandatory.
For this same reason (free to use but not free to run), I contribute to Jerry’s efforts AND to my local mastodon instance. Thanks for all you do Jerry. And your security podcast. And your pics of your orchids.
Thank you so much for your support. It is always good to hear from people that appreciate the podcast and orchid pics. I don’t get a lot of feedback so it’s nice to hear.
These are some concerns I’ve had too, but I think there’s progress being made.
Currently, it seems for the account migration/duplication is a self hosted effort but something that I’ve been looking into making a site for.
As for the long term viability of these instances, I would say it’s pretty rare that a bigger instance run by good admins go down frequently. The costs aren’t usually that high and can be managed fairly easily. From what I’ve seen, these instances are usually donation-based “monetization” so if no one donates its on the instance owner to eat the costs. In theory, one could make some sort of membership based instance, but I haven’t seen anything like that. I’ve seen discussions that if an instance was to start running ads that users would leave immediately… and that’s certainly their choice. It just makes it difficult if an instance is growing but does not have any contribution from the community to run the instance.
However, when the instance that people have registered on goes down, yes, they lose their progress, comments, history, etc… there is no way to transfer that to another instance.
Currently, there is only a way to move subscriptions, that I’m aware of.
As for the list of instances… that should be “unique” per instance, because that is the list of instances that are federating with the instance you’re looking at. So usually it’ll show the federating and blocking instances. So as long as at least one account is subscribing to those instances from your instance, it’ll show up there. Larger instances don’t necessarily need to seed their federation, but it’s common for new instances to seed federation and to start getting material out to the rest of the Fediverse.
Shortly after I moved from x/shitter to Mastodon and migrated as many followers that said they were moving as well, I subscribed to an art-focused mastondon instance. It was absolutely lovely to see impressionist paintings and other great art from museums in my daily feed. Then the site closed down. The admin running it decided he’d had enough.
I still found art, but now it’s local artists posting their work. It’s lovely, but in a different way. AND I can buy copies of the art if I want. So, I guess change is inevitable. In the real world, I’m sorta glad the Cheesecake Factory and Roundtable Pizza places closed leaving places for local restaurants to take their place.
Why do I hate Cheesecake Factory so much?
Their food is terrible. And the portions are so small.
[yes, that’s a Woody Allen joke]
