A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
It should be noted that Feddit.org was included to represent Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
I did not include Baraza.africa as that was too encompassing as it covers the whole African continent.
Hopefully this post inspires more countries to join the blue club!
seriously speaking, how much work is to host an instance actually? Besides buying the domain and getting it up and running on some cloud/homelab? The are any security concerns or maintenance that would take a lot of my time? Do I need to put some effort in instance level moderation, or that comes from communities? How many resources/hardware an instance uses per user?
If you have the technical know-how it isn't too bad. Equally, moderation and accepting accounts shouldn't be too much hassle. There are other Admins and devs on Matrix who will lend advice if you need it.
What you need to do is to invest a bit of time into planning to make the instance sustainable, especially as you are planning on running an instance for your country.
I say, go for it and if you need any help then there are a lot of people around who are more than happy to do what they can.
This is encouraging, I'll probably go and do it. Thanks for the insight.
Let us know how it goes and drop me a line on Matrix and I'll invite you to relevant groups. There is plenty of help there.
I helped take over the running of feddit.uk after the Admin went AWOL, so the situation is a bit different, but the lessons we learned are largely transferable to your case. So getting it up.ans running should be the easy bit, ensuring it can keep running is where all the planning and hard work comes in.
Setting up is easy, but keeping it up to date is often troublesome. Releases are far and few between and as such, whenever there is one, it includes a lot of changes. That leads to some instances having trouble pretty much every time; I've been on the unlucky side enough times to be wary.
Lemmy.cafe runs on 2 dual vcore 4gb ram VMs on digitalocean - one for db, another for lemmy itself.
Lemmy prides itself in being written in rust, but it leaks memory like a sieve - I've had split up the containers into smaller tasks (there's an official flag you can pass to it), double them up and set memory limits. That way when something gets killed by the kernel it's not really noticable to the end user.
Running a public instance of anything is a security concern, let alone alpha-beta software like lemmy. If you do run it on your homelab at home - at least get the cheapest vm in the cloud to hide your home IPs. You'd probably need to set up a wireguard tunnel to ensure outgoing federation does not reveal the IPs to other instances.
Instance level moderation is up to you. Don't be too dreamy - nobody will join your instance just because you have it running. Other than spammers and voting bots, that is. Moderation tools are just not there, so you'll have to fiddle in the db directly.
Having said all that - if all you want is a personal inatance - go for it! With sign ups disabled it's a much less stressful experience!
I want one for my country, and I want to validate that users are in fact people from my country. Once inside, they can do pretty much whatever they want. We aren't going to be a lot of people at the start for sure. What would you recommend me?
If you're dead set to run lemmy - then just do it! If soam becomes a problem - turn on registration verification. Spam usually comes in waves, so you don't even have to keep that barrier on all the time. Having said that - if you want some sort of nationality verification - application process could enable it.
If you're not set on lemmy - give piefed a shot. That's what I would run if I were setting up from scratch. Same format social media, but, at least from what I'm hearing - better software.
I wasn't aware of piefed, looks like it federates with Lemmy just fine. Maybe I grab a generalist fediverse domain for my country and have sub domains for lemmy, piefed, mastodon, and see what resonates more in my country.
Thank you for your insight!
If you don't want to spend too much time with moderation, you will have to manually approve registrations, simply to avoid spam. Sure, that increases the workload slightly, as you're gonna have to go through applications let's say once a week, but you don't have to monitor the instance 24/7. I would still recommend checking reports once in a while, just to be on the safe side. But definitely make sure to deploy @[email protected]'s fedi-safety to prevent CSAM from being uploaded on your instance.
Ty
I don't know from experience, but I've seen mentions of it taking serious work, including dealing with CP content being uploaded (federated?) to random instances...
Images don't federate. They could be cached on a remote instance.
I'm fairly certain AI tools exist to aid in scanning for child pornography. I haven't looked into it at all though so I dont know its efficacy.
I would also like to know this!