Now that this instance has been running for a little over two months, I thought it was a good time to zoom out a bit and do a little reflection.
Two Month Reflections
First, I cannot believe it's only been two months; it seems way longer than that (in both a good way and an "I'm so tired, you guys" way). While I do run other public-facing services, they're much more hands-off as far as day-to-day work is concerned. Lemmy, on the other hand, is very much like a living organism, almost a pet, that requires near constant supervision, interaction, and attention. The codebase is being rapidly developed, updated, and patched, new vulnerabilities and rough edges being discovered and mitigated, and bad actors constantly looking to exploit, DoS, spam, troll, or just shit all over the place.
It's not all bad, though. In the same two months, many new and exciting projects have sprung up to give Lemmy a fresh face with new UIs. DubVee is happy to offer several of those as official options (Photon, Mlmym, Alexandrite, Voyager). Watching Lemmy and these associated projects evolve, making contributions to the projects, and learning from/sharing tips & tricks with other instance admins have been exciting side-quests in my adventure of running this instance.
That said, there's hardly a dull day when it comes to running/administering the instance, but it is definitely an enjoyable experience overall.
What makes Lemmy unique, compared to the other more static services I run, is the sysadmin tasks are only half the work. The other half comes in the form of interacting with the communities I've created/joined, posting content, and moderating. While it's been rewarding and fun, it is also a lot of work sometimes. Lemmy is very much still small and growing, so there is also the pressure to "be the change you want to see in the world" which further motivates me to contribute content.
If I was just made aware of Lemmy today, would I still stand up my own instance?
Yeah, probably (ask me in again in 6 months though ๐).
Federated and decentralized ActivityPub applications are something I find very cool and hope to see gain traction as we move into the next phase of the web, so I'm happy to be a part of the early days of that.
I hail from the tail-end of the old days of the internet where people ran BBS's, forums, and sites as a hobby, when ads were rare or non-existent, and when everything, everywhere wasn't trying to monetize/inflame every human interaction you were trying to have. Lemmy seems like a modern take on the hobbyist-run forums of days past, and it's been like a breath of fresh air. Posting/commenting on Lemmy feels more like having an actual conversation/debate than the "shouting dick jokes into the void" feeling of larger platforms.
Operational Status, Funding, and Donations
Operational Status and Hosting Costs
This instance is 100% a hobby for me, so I have been prepared since day one to cover all associated costs as long as they remain reasonable. The Lemmy services are hosted from my project servers in my basement, so it costs me nothing, upfront anyway, to run them. DubVee's biggest expense to date, aside from my time/sanity, was the domain name. That was a vanity choice, though, as my first/test Lemmy instance, like many others out there, ran under my personal domain at no extra cost. At $20/yr for dubvee.org, I don't have a problem with the additional expense (I used to spend almost that much per day on fast food -- don't judge).
I use two cloud servers for the public-facing frontends and for caching/DDoS protection plus one more for status monitoring, but those are shared with my other services and have incurred no additional cost with the addition of Lemmy. Between the two servers and factoring in all of my other services, projections show my traffic egress limits and other metered resources to be sufficient for the foreseeable future and likely beyond.
With the core services being hosted on-prem, DubVee is susceptible to power and internet outages. I am fortunate that both have been largely reliable to date with minimal outages. I have approximately 40 minutes of UPS runtime which, to date, has covered 95% or more of my power interruptions. Internet uptime and stability is comparable.
I do have a backup/auxiliary internet source, but it is not of sufficient capacity to keep DubVee online for the public. However, I do have things configured to route federation traffic over the backup connection, when needed, as that traffic is more lightweight and less sensitive to latency. I do that so posts/comments from other instances will still come through.
Our application and infrastructure status page can be found here: https://status.dubvee.org
Funding/Donations
At this time, I have no plans to solicit or even accept donations. Barring a need to move fully to a cloud provider, I also do not see that changing in the future since it would, in my mind at least, turn a hobby into an obligation.
Thoughts for the Future
As stated earlier, I'm happy to be part of what I hope becomes the new model for social interactions online. I think it's in everyone's benefit to get away from engagement algorithms, constant ads, and centralized content, so I'm planning to stick with the Fediverse for the long haul.
I made an intentional choice to try to keep this instance small. The decision was made for both technical requirement reasons as well as administrative/moderation overhead. Currently, I am the sole admin of this instance, and I don't have the time/energy to manage a large number of users (at least with the current state of Lemmy's moderation toolset). Should signups/usage here increase significantly, I may need to recruit another admin as well as explore my contingency plan of moving the Lemmy backend services to a cloud provider.
If moving the instance fully to a cloud host becomes necessary, and depending on costs associated with that, I may re-evaluate soliciting/accepting donations. At this time, these are contingency plans only.
What happens if I ever decide to shut down?
While I currently have no plans to abandon DubVee or the Fediverse, things can and do change. As DubVee is still a small instance, current shutdown plans are to simply reach out to active users and let them know when I plan to sunset the instance and help them move to another. I'll also be happy to provide any data I can export for them to assist in their migration.
If by chance DubVee grows sufficiently (or is still small but someone else wants to take over operations in my stead), I would be open to transferring the domain and server-side resources to another party, assuming acceptable arrangements and guarantees can be made. I'd also be willing to co-admin or otherwise remain involved in such a scenario.
None of that should be taken as a hint I plan to shut down. My goal with the above statement is to simply codify the steps I would take if/when that scenario should arise.
What are your thoughts?
If there's anything you'd like to see implemented, spelled out in policy, or something I can do to improve the experience here, please feel free to suggest in the comments.