196 @lemmy.blahaj.zone Moss @lemmy.blahaj.zone 1y ago

VERY IMPORTANT POLL RESULTS: STAYING ON BLAHAJ.ZONE!!! (THANK GOODNESS)

Edit edit: pls stop voting we already decided. read the post title. I love blahaj.zone and personally wanted to stay.

EDIT-I feel the need to clarify that I don't really care either way, I have no ambitions to be an instance admin, I just want to do whatever's best/preferredf or the community-

Hello everyone, I'm making this post because I have received a very enticing offer that I think we as a community should consider.
Ruud from lemmy.world has reached out and offered to set up our own instance under the domain of 196.social, hosted on lemmy.world's hardware. This would allow the community to exist as a separate entity from any one instance, while also improving stability, as it would not be impacted by The same volume of hacks or attacks. It would also not be affected by Lemmy.worlds downtime as it would be fully separate.
The one trade-off is that we would have to fund this ourselves. Ruud says he is more than willing to cover the costs initially until we get some sort of funding set up, but after that grace period we would have to crowdsource the money. He says that the expenses of running a one community instance are very low, however. especially if we don't allow account creation, so it would not take many people to fund it per month.

Please vote in the comments whether we should remain on blahaj.zone, or migrate to our own instance.

32 comments

FYI, an update on the progress of our migration to new hardware/hosting

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/1417881
Stay here, blahaj feels like a match for 196 in terms of values
Happy sticking around here, for my vote
The Blahaj admins have said they're fine with us staying here, so I don't see much point in moving. Also do you really want to have to start doing fundraising for 196?

Feels like you keep looking to move without actually talking to the admins (who commented repeatedly on your last post). If you want to move, do it. But I won't be contributing financially if you decide to move to your own instance, there's a place for us here and it works fine.
So, one thing I'd mention is the systems and admin work involved in running an instance.

This is on top of the community moderation, and involves networking with other instance admins, maintaining good relations, deciding who to defeferate from, dealing with unhappy users, etc.

Then there's the setup and maintenance of the servers, security, hacks, DDoSing, backups, redundancy, monitoring, downtime, diagnosis, fixing performance issues, patching, coding, upgrades etc.

I wouldn't be here doing this without @ada. We make a formidable team, and without any self effacement, we are both at the top of our respective roles with decades of experience.

Big communities also magnify the amount of work involved. We're almost at the point where we are starting to consider getting additional people involved.

Moreover we're both here for the long haul, with the willingness and ability to personally cover the shortfall in hosting costs.

I'm not trying to convince you to stay here. But in addition to free hardware, you're going to need a small staff to do these things for you, so my advice is to work out if you have reliable AND trustworthy people (because these people will have access to confidential user data) who are committed to do this work long term with you. Where will you be in 3 years, 5, 10?
- Yeah it seems like Moss may be severely underestimating the work that goes into running an instance. You and Ada do a great job of running blahaj zone, and it seems pointless to move elsewhere and create more work for the people behind 196
- I would like to acknowledge here that Ada and I, while being part of a marginalized community are both still very privileged.
  
  I also want to make clear that I'm not saying that you need to have decades of experience, or the means to cover the costs by yourself, but rather wanted to point out it's a hard job and you need to have (multiple, qualified) people to do the job for a larger instance. There may also be times when the donations don't 100% cover the costs, and you'll need to have a plan when this happens.
  
  Unfortunately multiply intersectional marginalized people have a lot harder time getting that experience and to have a means to fund such instances. It can additonally be a lot harder for them to find opportunities to gain this experience.
  
  If you do find yourself in a similar situation, and would like an opportunity to gain some experience/training in a LGBTQIA+ / neuro-diverse / marginalized people-friendly community project, please message myself or @ada and we may be able to help.
i joined lemmy.blahaj.zone because i wanted to join lemmy.blahaj.zone. the reason this is the largest 196 community on lemmy is because like-minded users had the same idea. i don't care if 196.social is hosted with lemmy.world, but this 196 should stay where it is as long as there are users here.
Ruud says he is more than willing to cover the costs initially until we get some sort of funding set up, but after that grace period we would have to crowdsource the money.

How about getting funding handled first and then considering it.

Funding is an issue no matter how you slice it.

If you set it up elsewhere, then fail to secure funding, then it gets shut down, what then? Like may as well just shut it down to begin with if you haven't gotten funding figured out, because that will be the outcome. Site lost, because funding wasn't handled first. This an example of "putting the cart before the horse."
- Yeah, to me it seems like Moss is being a little impulsive
  
  You said this a lot better than me in the paragraph I just posted 😅
Stay on Blåhaj. Plzzzz, come on - Moss, don't be scared Blåhaj wants 196, it's just that they had to fix some hardware stuff.

It's good here and lgbtq friendly; idonno about lemmy.world, but Blåhaj is the best
I've said it before and I'll say it again, I really like that 196 is here on blahaj
Yeah, I'd be worried about the community dying due to lack of funds instead of engagement. It only takes a month or two for that to happen. Even if the host is decent about it charity can only go so far. I'd vote to not become a new instance as cool as that sounds.

Edit: I'd rather see funds go to a place like blahaj to keep it up and thriving. That'd be a much better use of money
I'll be honest, where we are now is pretty good as is. I mean, it's where 196 is strongest apart from Tumblr (and Reddit since they're opening that back up). A queer inclusive space like this is once in a blue moon, and I doubt it'll grow as big as this 196, much like how this instance wont be nearly as big as r/196. I say stay on blahaj.
On a general note, since 196 over on reddit is reopening, I feel what this community needs is stability. The server is running really well (for me), it's not blocking tor or vpn traffic, it's not behind cloudflare and the admins are not bigots. The stuff you as sublemmy(?) owner should care about is keeping post quality high, and taking care about hostile users. This community is nice, and I'd hope I can come here for some nice memes for a long time. That's just my _rambling 2 cents.
- Also: Moss if you're reading this, how about making a chat with the mod team (maybe even public for transparency) where you discuss stuff like this first? Idk if Ada and Kaity are hosting a matrix server too, but feels like a fitting platform. Maybe add a public, an offtopic room and a secret mod room too and combine that into a matrix space. It would avoid making noise here if it is not necessary.
  
  We're not running a matrix server at the moment, but it might be something we can consider.
Lemmy.world has had so much downtime lately I'm not sure it's a great idea to tie yourselves to their instance.
- Nono That's what I'm saying we would be unaffected by their downtime as it would be a completely separate instance.
  
  If you're unaffected by the downtime go for it I just have concerns regarding Lemmy.world, and ngl it kind of rubs me the wrong way that the instance admin is, at least as it appears to me, poaching communities from other instances to host on his hardware. Was there an issue with blahaj.zone I'm unaware of?
I vote stay.

While the Fediverse is built to be decentralized, social networks rely on network effects. People gather where other people are. There will always be 'winners' and 'losers' in building an instance, or even making an alternative 196. c/196 f/196, c/195, fedi196.gay, ect. The original started out with over half a million members, small by Reddit standards. We're the largest alternative around, and we got less than 10k.

Administering an entire instance for one community seems like overkill, especially when there is a path forward to reducing costs significantly.

Also I like the vibes here.

But if you are concerned with server costs...

The existing plan should take care of the significant majority of costs. AWS charges out the ass for data egress, and while I don't know the billing specifics, this instance moves roughly 1TB a day, and the majority of it is static images by virtue of well, images. It was mentioned that this covers half of existing costs upwards of 1-2k. So whats the obvious solution? Don't use AWS for storage or transfer.

Cloudflare and a significant chunk of other providers are part of something called the Bandwidth Alliance (which AWS declined to be a part of) and most importantly, these providers offer S3 compatible object storage without data egress fees. Lemmy uses something called pict-rs; on default settings, uses local storage that has to be part of the VPS that you rent. Enabling object storage allows you to move storage away from the VPS itself and onto a different provider - one that does not charge data egress fees. (Easy money? idk) Ideally, you also get edge caching as a bonus.

So what about the data transfer not associated with images and can't be easily remedied? Different VPS providers have different benefits. Digital Oceans lets you customize your VPS to the Nth degree, Hertzner offers up to 20TB of transfer with it's VPS offerings. While I can't vouch for them myself, that should be enough to cover a whatever other thumbnails and other data that can't be shoved into object storage. Either way, still cheaper than AWS.

As for AWS load balancing, uhhhhh standard nginx/apache config? I've only used nginx as a reverse proxy but I'm not paying for it.

Not touching DB management with a 10 foot pole

TLDR: AWS is great for small projects and my relatives drooling over A40's but they charge for egress, and other QoL services that typically get used by companies with deep pockets.
stay
I think we should stay independent. I'm happy with the current arrangements, and I think the admin team have done an amazing job sticking to their principles in doing things like defederating Threads to protect users proactively.

Sure, there are some upsides to migrating, but we've seen firsthand recently from Reddit and Twitter that the moment you say "let's put our community on someone else's hardware" you're basically at their mercy.
lemmy.blahaj.zone servers seem slow, so I'd be ok with this
- They're slow rn because they're being worked on. The admins have been very open about this in their recent post. They're changing how the instance is hosted so it doesn't cost them the $3000 per month it costs ATM. Once the maintenance is done, things will be back to normal
It seems a good deal to me. But are there any downsides other than the community being tied to lemmy.world?

I’m just afraid this defeats the idea of federation because it may be a precedent for large communities “centralizing” with large instances.
- We wouldn't be on lemmy world, we'd be on a completely separate instance, making it more decentralized!
Blåhaj is a friend to all. Stay
i vote stay
It seems like everyone has already made up their minds, but I really like the domain 196.social it sounds very cute. It feels like we could expand to things like a chat community with weekly check-ins similar to what Beehaw does. Our own slice of the internet that will live as long as 196 users exist.

It depends who would have to deal with upgrades and such but it sounds so cool to have our own domain. I also like that it would be on EU servers, just because.

Though being a large community we can also fund blahaj zone which would help smaller blahaj communities. So just because of this we should stay. My only gripe with blahaj lemmy is the domain is so long and clunky. But thats so minor lol.

Just let me dream for a few minutes :3

32 comments