Hey everyone! Figured I would do an AMA to kick off some activity in the IAmA community over here. Feel free to throw down some questions below and ill answer them
I’m currently a student in university and have been doing both web development and game development recently (web for internships, game on my own). Out of the four admins ive been the one mainly handling community creation and managing in the instance to make sure everythings running smoothly
Some other misc topics that I can answer about: I compose music & make pixel art, and my favorite games are minecraft, SCP:SL, everhood, battlerite, and metal slug 3
If anyone else wants to do an AMA feel free to start one up in the community (assuming it fits the instance). Any activity helps get the ball rolling for getting it active
Thanks for hosting us, my question is directly related: What kind of hardware do you use for hosting the instance? Is it local or in some cloud? Where do you think lemmys biggest issues will be when it comes to scaling?
The first question there I cant really answer since I dont deal with hosting (the other admins are the ones doing that) but I think its on a VPS. In terms of issues with scaling, that will be from smaller instances interacting with larger ones. If theres a small instance with around 10 people that federates and gets content from all the communities in the bigger instances it would need more resources than usual due to all the content coming in that is needs to handle and store. That then expanded for all of the different small instances can get to be a bit much for all of them. Things that can prevent that though is people in the same instance subscribing to the same things (since it already got that content so it doesnt need to get it again for the other person) and not subscribing to everything you see
Would you be able to share an estimate of monthly costs associated with hosting this instance? I don’t need an exact number, just an idea of the budget you should have ready if you want Lemmy on VCS.
current costs are around $2.1k a year so divided by 12 months would be $175 a month. Part of that was due to the initial domain name purchase though which was $580
Thank you! Now that I think about, I’ll make sure to donate a bit, it sounds like a pretty expensive hobby and so far, I really like this instance.
Have you maybe considered some kind of supporter badges for accounts? I wouldn’t include any other benefits to not alienate the userbase too much, but almost every time I’ve actually realized that I should donate to some project I really liked was thanks to someone having a supporter badge, even though I’ve seen numerous banners or messages asking for donations - which may be because they are so frequent and resemble ads too much, that I’m conditioned to just not pay any attention to them by default. But a supporter badge may inspire some more people to donate.
yeah ive been thinking about that as a way to show supporters. Might be something that can be added in once I get flairs down and it can show up beside someone similar to the creator, mod, admin, etc. bubbles