Fediverse

Waaa!~ Why won't people give me free compute and storage. ~Waaaa!~

Keep a backup of your important contributions. Easy. You could even mirror whatever lemmy instance you're scared will disappear. Easy. Don't delete the memes you upload. Easy.

I don't know the details, and honestly I don't really care for the drama, but if you're not happy with the current options for servers and governance, just host your own?

You seem to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to operate like, and you said in another response, that you have experience building servers.

It's not hard to get a server built that has enough compute and storage to support the kind of capacity you're talking about. Any used, corporate desktop from the last 7-10 years has more than enough compute to handle hundreds of active users. Storage is the main issue, but that's not unattainable either. As of a week ago, Server Monkey was selling certified refurbished Dell enterprise 6TB HDDs for $175 each. $700 gets you around 18TB with one disk for redundancy using ZFS. 18TB will hold quite a bit of dank memes, especially if you limit the max resolution to something reasonable.

1,500 new pictures per day, all 50 megapixel JPEGs is roughly 670GB per month, so even at that pretty crazy rate (by Lemmy standards) your 18TB server would last two years before getting totally full.

Backblaze archival storage is $1,500 per year for 18TB if you want long term secure cloud backups for your entire server, that's just $125 a month that you'd need to fund yourself or get donations for. Not nothing, but hardly unattainable for a small instance. I used to play on a tiny Minecraft server that had maybe 20 active players, and they made more than $125 per month on donations.

I mean, again, all of this code is FOSS. If you really feel that your approach would be significantly more successful, dive in and build out your own instance. Get some friends involved, split up the costs, market yourselves, get some nice branding, build alliances and partnerships with other instances, etc. There is literally nothing stopping you.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

Host the media yourself, it's easy.

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.

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.

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.