First, I want to say thank you for making Lemmy and for running this instance!
But, this “promotion initiative” strikes me as questionable idea for two reasons:
Having many instances hosted on the same infrastructure defeats a lot of the purpose of the federated model. If/when this infrastructure goes down for whatever reason, many instances will be affected.
If I understand your offer correctly, you’re actually only offering free hosting for one year? So, after a year, if the admins aren’t able to provide their own infrastructure, will you stop running their instances? This seems like it will inevitably leave a lot of users with a very negative impression of lemmy, when all of their posts and comments evaporate in to thin air.
Maybe the overlap between the set of people who are capable of running their own server and the set of people who would use a service like this is larger than I’m imagining, but I’m quite certain there are a lot of people in the second set who are not in the first.
It seems to me that a better approach would be to focus on making it as easy as possible to deploy lemmy, to encourage more instances on diverse infrastructure. (I see you already already have Docker, Ansible, and AWS instructions; as an aside, I recommend replacing the AWS instructions with a note recommending that users boycott Amazon…)
The time limit of one year is exactly because we dont want to host these instances forever, and centralize the project in that way. If the instances become popular and get many users, surely there will be someone willing to host them. If they are small and no one wants to host them, the content cant be that important. Besides, content will be mirrored on federated instances.
If you would like to improve the documentation, that would be very welcome, repo is here. However, i dont think its the right place to call for boycotts, or other political stuff like that.
Many small Lemmy instances have already disappeared over time. You are free to archive existing instances, so that doesnt happen again. But in general, things disappear from the internet over time, whether you like it or not. Not even archive.org can prevent that.
First, I want to say thank you for making Lemmy and for running this instance!
But, this “promotion initiative” strikes me as questionable idea for two reasons:
Having many instances hosted on the same infrastructure defeats a lot of the purpose of the federated model. If/when this infrastructure goes down for whatever reason, many instances will be affected.
If I understand your offer correctly, you’re actually only offering free hosting for one year? So, after a year, if the admins aren’t able to provide their own infrastructure, will you stop running their instances? This seems like it will inevitably leave a lot of users with a very negative impression of lemmy, when all of their posts and comments evaporate in to thin air.
Maybe the overlap between the set of people who are capable of running their own server and the set of people who would use a service like this is larger than I’m imagining, but I’m quite certain there are a lot of people in the second set who are not in the first.
It seems to me that a better approach would be to focus on making it as easy as possible to deploy lemmy, to encourage more instances on diverse infrastructure. (I see you already already have Docker, Ansible, and AWS instructions; as an aside, I recommend replacing the AWS instructions with a note recommending that users boycott Amazon…)
The time limit of one year is exactly because we dont want to host these instances forever, and centralize the project in that way. If the instances become popular and get many users, surely there will be someone willing to host them. If they are small and no one wants to host them, the content cant be that important. Besides, content will be mirrored on federated instances.
If you would like to improve the documentation, that would be very welcome, repo is here. However, i dont think its the right place to call for boycotts, or other political stuff like that.
deleted by creator
Many small Lemmy instances have already disappeared over time. You are free to archive existing instances, so that doesnt happen again. But in general, things disappear from the internet over time, whether you like it or not. Not even archive.org can prevent that.