When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you're trusting somebody else's infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.

If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.

Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I'm trusting.

Is this running on:

• A $5 VPS?
• A dedicated server with redundant storage?
• Someone's mini PC under their desk?
• AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
• A database with proper backups?
• A server with no backups at all?

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them. Their solution was - just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx https://lemmy.radio/.

That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)

If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying enterprise hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load? Do you even have a plan my friends?

I don't know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.

I'm not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.

Just put some basics in /about:

• Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc.
• Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM
• Storage: 2 TB NVMe
• Backups: Daily, retained 30 days
• Media backups: Yes / No
• Off-site backups: Yes / No
• Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large
• Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.

That tells me infinitely more about whether I'm comfortable making an instance my home.

• Have admin(s) ever hosted any production software before? First time?
• are there even backups?
• Is there even any plans for scalability? What if your traffic goes 4x? what about 20x? do you have a plan beyond banning me and removing everythig I ever posted?
  And honestly, backups matter to same tune as CPU model.

Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.

But you can't make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers.

Is that the reason why all lemmy instances dont let you upload more than 5Mb media? probably.

If you cant afford hosting costs - holy fuck, just stop fucking saying "everyone welcome" if you then going to ban those same "welcomed" people after they post 10 image memes (thx https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ and https://lemmy.radio/ and https://lemmy.ml/). no no - 👏you 👏 cant 👏 afford 👏 non-text 👏 users 👏, - instead you falsely accuse people of spamming and banning their accounts. No wonder lemmy is at 35k MAU. Hardware poor admins - you don't even know what spamming is, you shouldn't have kids users if you cant afford them, dont invite them in or just advertise your instances as text-only.

Hardware poor admins - stop inviting people. you have no capacity and only actively harming lemmy adoption.

There should be a list of such instances that should be inviting people at all.

Instance infrastructure shouldn't be a mystery.

If you're asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they're building it on. You likely cant afford non-text users anyways.

I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them and solution being - just banning me and removing all my data.

This is kind of an architectural problem with Lemmy and PieFed at the moment tbh. Not everything is federated, just the post and comments. If the post is an image, the instance you post from is going to have to serve that image to all users of the Fediverse (though at least other instances sometimes cache thumbnails). Depending on bandwidth I could easily see someone posting a lot of popular memes and other image posts requiring a lot of bandwidth, which may cost a decent amount of money, or cause the instance to reach traffic limits, depending on hosting.

Why not host your own if you're gonna repost all Reddit posts as your own ?

It's understandable that if you spam you'll most likely get banned. If you want to do that, no problem, but do it on your own hardware.

yeah it seems like media is just lmited to 5Mb. and thats on a largest lemmy server - lemmy.world.

I cant upload most of the videos it seems or even larger gif files

I genuinely considering this. I would have already built couple servers and shipped to a colo if this was 2025. but stupid AI really messed up this market and I dont want another single server setup.

It's understandable that if you spam you'll most likely get banned.

I think people on lemmy have completely lost the meaning of the word spam.
Spam isn't "someone posts more often than I personally like." Spam is mostly unwanted stuff, ads - Viagra ads, affiliate links, scams, or the same garbage repeatedly.

You can call it high-volume posting. You can dislike reposts. You can even say the volume is annoying.

But high-volume, relevant content isn't automatically spam just because you don't want to see it.

its not just me - lemmy stuck at 35k MAU.

I'm all in for using AI, but I don't think peoples on Lemmy are interested in a copy of Reddit with only bot content, else they would not be there but on Reddit directly.

Acting as a RSS feed on Lemmy is low quality posting to get my attention, which I would consider spam (especially without the bot tag on the account)

tthis is much bigger than reposts. Lemmy has a pile of structural problems that make it hard for normal users to trust or stick with it:

• Instances have disappeared with user data because admins had no usable backups.
• You often have no idea if your home instance has proper backups or is one disk failure away from disappearing.
• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can't even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.
• Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you "look like a bot." No warning, no conversation, no chance to adjust. (honestly - seems to me they just dont have hosting money and thus have to ban everyone posting more than 10 posts a day) thanks sopuli.xyz and lemmy.zip for banning me after 10 posts
• Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )
• Quadruple moderation: community mods, home-instance admins, receiving-instance admins, plus a public modlog that follows you around. Most people just want to have fun - and moderation at every corner is not fun. Waay worse than even reddit which bans for other reasons. (thanks https://sopuli.xyz/ and https://lemmy.zip/ for banning me new accounts after 10 posts - everyone welcom you say? stop saying that, admit you have no hosting money)
• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.
• Many instances have no sustainable funding model and admins personally eat the hosting costs. I think it comes down to this - they ban you because they have no money on hosting, they should just frigging say so.
• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they're trusting with years of their content.

And then we're obsessing over whether bringing filtered, highly rated content from elsewhere is going to destroy Lemmy.

^ I really don think me posting content is the problem. Anoter big problem is - lemmy cant afford to have it.

Lemmy is sitting around 35k MAU. Maybe the problem isn't that we're making it too easy to participate.

Data loss, tiny media limits, fragile hosting, instant bans, quadruple moderation, empty communities, and no meaningful appeals process.

There's a lot more standing between Lemmy and mainstream adoption than somebody reposting a meme from Reddit.

Limited form of this is already used by PieFed instance chooser. Stability is calculated basing on number of admins with emergency access, non-admins paying enough for hosting and having automated daily backups.

Lol I don't care if my "contributions" disappear. It's Lemmy...

I know many people see it this way - where basically lemmy data is temporary.
"ephemeral lemmy instances" is what they are 🤣

This is a problem with Lemmy on the admin side. I set up retention, and any post here is automatically deleted if it's more than a year old and nobody has interacted with it. But I had to write a lot of custom scripting to handle that, and it still screws up: I was somehow counting profile photos as posts, deciding they got no interaction, then deleting everyone's profile photos. I fixed it, of course, but that isn't something admins should have to handle from scratch, by hand, on every server. No instance owner can afford to store everything, forever, for free, for users. Especially in this market where memory and hard drives are soon going to cost as much as my house. This instance is funded entirely by me, at about $200 per month, located in a Canadian data center. But $200 is a hard cap; I need to find ways to ensure we stay within that monthly amount, or try and raise money from a collection of my fellow blind users, who likely have nothing to spare. This isn't a beg post, just trying to give you insight into the realities of instance hosting. Right now Lemmy expects that all admins are okay with media and database storage that expands for ever and ever, infinitely. Most of us are not. Meaning that if we're technical enough, we can write our own custom solutions to handle it. Or if we're not, our only recourse is banning users to force Lemmy to delete whatever's filling the disc.

I'm a well federated instance, so I guess I could make a contract to sell all the data I get to an AI provider, and that would allow me to afford to store everything forever. But I'm not willing to do that, and I suspect if I tried every other instance would defederate us anyway.

The lack of tagging on OP’s account has been the biggest reason I considered blocking them. I don’t mind reposters, but tag your shit so people who don’t want it can filter it. I quickly gave them a bright red user tag instead. So I can at least see at a glance when a post is from them, to then decide if I want to engage.

Especially when a lot of their posts have been old Reddit content, (often from several years ago) which was clearly just meant to grab attention. Their posts always felt like the “tales from reddit” types of YouTube channels, where someone just reads Reddit posts verbatim and adds a few quips as “content”.

make sense -- a huge majority of lemmy seems to be running on hamster wheels of geriatric hamsters. lol

• Instances have disappeared with user databecause admins had no usable backups.

Some of us consider that a good (or at least impartial) thing. Many Reddit users discovered how difficult it is to actually delete your data when they migrated to Lemmy. Lemmy’s userbase tends to be very privacy-focused, so harping about “it’s easy for your stuff to get deleted” isn’t the win you think it is.

Admins can ban you after 10 posts because they decide you "look like a bot."

I mean… I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content. And I don’t mind reposts, but I do mind untagged reposts. Leaving your stuff untagged feels deceptive at best. Like those “tales from Reddit” YouTube accounts, that just read old Reddit posts verbatim and call it “content”.

• Media uploads are ridiculously constrained on all instances. literally all. Tiny file limits mean you can't even upload normal modern photos, GIFs, or videos. 5Mb limit on lemmy.world - and thats the largest instance.

I haven’t personally experienced any file size limits, but I mostly use external media uploads for in-comment images. But at least for me, (and I’d say I’m a fairly average user) the file size limit has been fine.

Admins can ban you after months of posts too. Just because - they didnt know hosting can get expensive. Months of contributions can disappear with the account. (already happened to me )

I’m actually a little confused by this one. Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans? Or that posts shouldn’t get deleted when a user gets banned? Because either one fundamentally breaks the reasons for a ban system existing in the first place. Imagine if you were an admin who banned someone for posting illegal content… But banning them didn’t delete the illegal content.

• Defederation can suddenly make you invisible to entire groups of users.

I don’t concern myself with who can see my posts. I post for myself and my own entertainment. If other people don’t want to see my posts, that’s fine with me.

• Users usually have absolutely no idea what infrastructure they're trusting with years of their content.

Again, “content” is ephemeral. Lemmy doesn’t track your total karma like Reddit does, so what are you actually losing? I can see an argument if someone is a longtime troubleshooter. Because that kind of “help I’m having an obscure problem and the only Google result is a Reddit post from six years ago” content drives a lot of traffic to Reddit.

But I’m not worried if my shitposts vanish. In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts. On this account, I live in the southern US and work as an audio technician for live events. You think that’s actually true though? It may be based on shreds of truth, (I have enough experience to be a competent audio technician, for instance,) but it’s not actually true. Every single new account gets a new persona. Having my old posts vanish is a benefit, not a drawback.

I’m not trying to say your complaints are invalid. On basically any other social media platform, your complaints would be perfectly justified. But you may be barking up the wrong tree, because the “drawbacks” you are complaining about are the exact reason many of us are here. I want my posts to vanish eventually. I want my old content to be purged after a reasonable timeframe. If a hurricane six countries away kills the server this is hosted on, and there are no off-site backups? Cool, I’ll take it as a chance to start fresh like I do all the time anyways.

This is a problem on the entire fedi, not just lemmy.

Host the media yourself, it's easy.

Exactly why I host my own. Not under this username though, because I'd get defed'd by most of Lemmy. LOL My stalkers don't know my instance name or username there because it doesn't interact with this username at all. haha

Everyone should own their own. To be clear tho, mine is totally a $5 VPS from a racknerd black friday sale held together with Docker Compose and prayers. But I only have 6 active users, who are all my friends, and I won't allow more, so all good!

Thanks for all you do. I appreciate your efforts!

Some of us consider [data disappearing] a good thing.

I love to have privacy. I hate when im forcible deplatformed and decontented. hate hate it.

Choosing to delete your data is privacy. Losing it because an admin had no working backup is data loss.
Those are completely different things.
If you want to burn your account every year, great. But someone else may have spent five years writing troubleshooting guides, moderating a community, or building useful discussions. They should be able to expect their home instance to have a backup.

I thought you were a repost bot when I first saw your content.

I created two new accounts and both were banned after roughly 10 posts overnight. No warning. No "hey, are you automating this?" No request to slow down or tag the account. Just assumption --> bot/spam -> ban.

Also - automation is not even fucking illegal on lemmy.world!!! do people not realize that?

Note that reddit does not do that. post as much as the fuck you want. Imagine new lemmy user doing this and just getting banned. wth. resson for 35k MAU

I haven't personally experienced any file size limits

External hosting isn't a substitute for local media hosting. Hotlinking gets blocked all the time, URLs expire or posts get removed. Authentication gets added. Hosts disappear. HTTP headers and referrer policies break embeds. Some major platforms deliberately make direct linking difficult.

If I want media attached to a post to remain available, the reliable option is for the instance to actually host a copy., 5 MB is tiny for modern media.

Are you suggesting that people with post history should be immune to bans?

hell No. Obviously if someone posts CSAM, malware, threats, or other illegal content, remove it and ban them.

I'm talking about proportionality.

If somebody has contributed hundreds of legitimate posts for months and then an admin decides their posting volume is too expensive, banning the account and wiping everything they've contributed is insane infrastructure management.

And on the other extreme, I had brand-new accounts banned after around 10 posts simply because admins apparently decided they looked like bots.

There's a gigantic spectrum between "do nothing" and "nuke the account."

not even a warning? not even a pm? ffs really? Rate-limit them. Remove the offending posts. Temporarily suspend them. Communicate.

A ban system existing doesn't mean every problem requires the maximum penalty.

I don't concern myself with who can see my posts.

up to you, you are you. federation is a social network. Most people posting to communities presumably want other people to see and interact with what they post.

An entire instance suddenly becoming unable to interact with another instance is absolutely relevant to those users.

"content" is ephemeral. What are you actually losing?

Potentially years of knowledge.

You actually gave the perfect example yourself: that obscure six-year-old troubleshooting post that solves somebody's problem.

Today's shitpost is disposable. Today's detailed technical answer might be somebody's Google result five years from now.

The whole point I'm making is that users should get to decide what's disposable, not discover that their instance admin decided it for them by never setting up backups.

Wait…

You got banned because you were spamming Reddit posts and now you want to upload video?

E: lol yeah that’s what’s happening here.

In fact, I burn my Lemmy accounts after about a year and start fresh, specifically to avoid any accidental buildup of info that could be used to dox me. I even use red herring info in my “personal” posts.

This is the way.

Actually, with regards to data control, lemmy is the worst of both worlds.

Because it's federated, your posts will be out there. If you accidentally post something you didn't mean to like doxing yourself, there is much less of chance to permanently delete your data compared to a centralised service (like reddit).

This isnt a problem, its the nature of the beast. Host your own instance if you care.

I don't care if your "contributions" disappear either. Your Reddit repost bot won't be missed.

this is road to nowhere for lemmy.

we are basically saying - all users should be super tech savvy, host their own server, not worry about being banned left and right.

whos gonna stay on those conditions?

you missing the point - I dont care about my content. its fluff imo.
but this network will never go anywhere without content. that the whole reasons I was trying
I didnt realize there was a host of other issues.

lke noone is going to jump into a network with moderation more severe than reddit. that was the whole point of getting away from reddit.

MAU is a number that matters to corporations and advertisers. No one running a Lemmy server is either of these so that metric isn't really useful or say anything.

Lemmy has been going for 6 years now and it is still new. It isn't even version 1.0. Success in Lemmy is not what you think it is. The most successful Lemmy server is Hexbear because it stands alone and is growing the community they want.

Why do you want Lemmy to metastasize like a cancer?

MAU measures whether people actually use the platform.

And Reddit has spent those six years practically begging users to leave:

• Killed third-party apps
• Locked down its API
• Pushed logins and the official app
• Increased ads
• Monetized user data
• Pissed off moderators and communities

Yet Lemmy is still around 35k MAU.

At some point "we're still new" isn't an excuse. Your biggest competitor keeps shooting itself in the foot and you're still not growing. its not working chief

trust me - I really wanted it to work. but lemmy is really this bad.

I wanted to leave reddit. but ther is nothing and noone here that why

I dont think this place is your speed.

Lemmy doesn't have any competitors, it isn't competing. It isn't what you think it is. You are still using a corporate framing for a non corporate system. There is no company, there is no manger, there is no goal. This measurement is only to say 35k people are using it now, but it doesn't matter is my entire point. "Lemmy" is a federated network for enthusiasts with no corporate direction that is still in early development. There is no competitor, growth isn't the purpose of it, it is software made by communists.

Jesus Christ, everyone here seems to have invented their own definition of what Lemmy is.

Lemmy doesn't have competitors. It isn't competing. It isn't what you think it is.

Except the actual Lemmy developers describe it as:

"a decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators"

They've been calling it a Reddit alternative since at least 2020.

So no, I'm not imposing some imaginary "corporate framing" onto Lemmy. I'm using basically the same framing its own developers used to explain why they built it.

And "there is no manager or corporate goal" doesn't mean adoption suddenly becomes meaningless. If you're building an alternative to corporate-controlled link aggregators, whether anybody actually adopts the alternative fucking matters.

Otherwise what are we celebrating? Software existing?

And that's why 35k MAU matters to me. Reddit has spent years handing alternatives opportunities on a silver platter, and Lemmy hasn't capitalized on them.

You can personally define success as "35k enthusiasts are happy." Fine.

But stop pretending your definition of Lemmy is the official one while telling everyone else "you don't understand what Lemmy is." Even the developers explicitly called it a Reddit alternative.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.

For a link aggregator, this means a user registered on one server can subscribe to forums on any other server, and can have discussions with users registered elsewhere.

It is an easily self-hostable, decentralized alternative to Reddit and other link aggregators, outside of their corporate control and meddling.

"This site that people are already happy with isn't exactly how I like it so therefore it must change for me"

Ok man

people are not happy with it. most people leave.

What's it to you? Be one of those people. Make your own social media site if you think your ideas are so good. I'm sure you'll hit whatever MAU you set your mind to.

You've formed your opinion on what makes a good website based on capitalism's definition of success. Like the other commenter said, you want Lemmy to be a cancer.

I dont want corporate control. I like lemmy.
but its not working - it needs to be much much bigger to really affect reality

You're asking a lot to the admin of a (free) instance to comply with your needs.
Most of the issues you mention disappear if you host you own instance, you can set your own rate limit, control your backups and decide what you accept or not on your instance.

Specifically on the limit for images, lemmy-pictr is my highest ressource consumer, so I can understand why admins of public instance would put limits.

see issue is - most non techie people wont even understand why they being banned. thats the problem.
me running my own instance solves issue for me, does nothing for others.

Why do we need it to affect reality?

I feel like he's upvoting from an alt account, too. Pretty interesting how his posts and comments seem to start at +2 now... Almost the same time as that "new" bot real human who reposts from reddit with truncated titles....

Back in the hexbear days I thought maybe the fediverse should abandon the “Reddit model” of threaded discussion with voting.

The problem wasn’t just the moderation or people in charge, it was the structure of the system.

comes election when reddit sabotages all news and only ships corporate propaganda you dont have to have an independent influence?

I don't know, I kind of like threaded discussions. Back in the forum days, it was hard to deal with two concurrent conversations.

I wasn't a fan of it on Reddit but I have less of an opinion here because it doesn't seem to significant impact on discoverability.

And why does that have to be here on one of the existing servers you don't manage or pay for?

Most non-techie peoples don't re-publish ~30 posts par days 😉

You're definitely not the average Lemmy user.

Their server their rules, you don't like it, build your own or find a community that accept you :)

You want to help other to repost shitpost ? Create an instance and host them to spam the world if you want.

because while I can - it wont do anything if lemmy is at 35k MAU. need distribution and volume.
has to be onpar with large plaeyers

at the momen 35k MAU is 4x less than my wife cookie blog monthly sorry

Nobody gives a shit how you think this place should be. Who are you? Some random person who showed up 3 months ago and started spamming and shitting all over it.

You've been told that's not how we do things here countless times yet you keep it up. And worse, you have the gall to complain that a small instance can't keep up with the amount of garbage you're botting over here.

Based on that complaint alone, I don't think you even understand how the fediverse works to begin with so maybe don't have such an ego about your opinion of what it needs.

Take the hint, man. Pay up or shut up.

Your biggest competitor keeps shooting itself in the foot and you’re still not growing. its not working chief

So what do you suggest we do with our 0 USD marketing war chest?

Lemmy isn’t really our competitor. From a financial perspective, each person who switches from Reddit to Lemmy is a sum loss to both Reddit and Lemmy. Hosting costs money, and unlike Reddit, Lemmy has no advertising revenue to overcome that cost.

Kill the corporate marketer in your head.

Edit to add that quite a few Redditors would be a nightmare to moderate. We don’t even want those assholes. Lemmy instances are communities of volunteers, not revenue streams.

By this reasoning, the rate limiting added to PieFed recently-ish starts making far more sense. Not what you propose and not Rimu's reasoning that I'd seen, but should also help decreasing the acceleration of resources consumption.