Hey everyone! Figured I would do an AMA to kick off some activity in the IAmA community over here. Feel free to throw down some questions below and ill answer them
I’m currently a student in university and have been doing both web development and game development recently (web for internships, game on my own). Out of the four admins ive been the one mainly handling community creation and managing in the instance to make sure everythings running smoothly
Some other misc topics that I can answer about: I compose music & make pixel art, and my favorite games are minecraft, SCP:SL, everhood, battlerite, and metal slug 3
If anyone else wants to do an AMA feel free to start one up in the community (assuming it fits the instance). Any activity helps get the ball rolling for getting it active
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Thanks for hosting us, my question is directly related: What kind of hardware do you use for hosting the instance? Is it local or in some cloud? Where do you think lemmys biggest issues will be when it comes to scaling?
The first question there I cant really answer since I dont deal with hosting (the other admins are the ones doing that) but I think its on a VPS. In terms of issues with scaling, that will be from smaller instances interacting with larger ones. If theres a small instance with around 10 people that federates and gets content from all the communities in the bigger instances it would need more resources than usual due to all the content coming in that is needs to handle and store. That then expanded for all of the different small instances can get to be a bit much for all of them. Things that can prevent that though is people in the same instance subscribing to the same things (since it already got that content so it doesnt need to get it again for the other person) and not subscribing to everything you see
Would you be able to share an estimate of monthly costs associated with hosting this instance? I don’t need an exact number, just an idea of the budget you should have ready if you want Lemmy on VCS.
current costs are around $2.1k a year so divided by 12 months would be $175 a month. Part of that was due to the initial domain name purchase though which was $580
Thank you! Now that I think about, I’ll make sure to donate a bit, it sounds like a pretty expensive hobby and so far, I really like this instance.
Have you maybe considered some kind of supporter badges for accounts? I wouldn’t include any other benefits to not alienate the userbase too much, but almost every time I’ve actually realized that I should donate to some project I really liked was thanks to someone having a supporter badge, even though I’ve seen numerous banners or messages asking for donations - which may be because they are so frequent and resemble ads too much, that I’m conditioned to just not pay any attention to them by default. But a supporter badge may inspire some more people to donate.
yeah ive been thinking about that as a way to show supporters. Might be something that can be added in once I get flairs down and it can show up beside someone similar to the creator, mod, admin, etc. bubbles
What got you interested in programming (or tech in general)? And what was your first language/programming experience?
The first thing that got me interested was mainly on the game dev side. In grades 5 & 6 a lot of people in my class would make games on scratch and then play each others stuff. There was also someone in my class who was making stuff like a website, etc. that I thought looked really cool so wanted to start doing my own stuff similar to that. Then when I was in grade 7 there was two main games that were popular and developed primarily by one person each (Undertale by Toby Fox and Five Nights at Freddys by Scott Cawthon). Seeing and enjoying those games started making me think that if they can do it then I can too so I starting doing a bunch of things relating to programming.
For tech in general it would be playing warcraft 3 when I was 5
What security concerns do the admins have regarding operation of the instance? How have you dealt with them?
Out of the things I can talk about the main issue has mostly been the threat of spam + upvote bots from other instances due to federation. We have an application process to stop bots but since we federate with everyone by default someone can spin up an instance or hijack a lower security instance and just fill it with bots to then interact with posts here. It hasnt happened yet thankfully but if it becomes a problem we will likely have to start defederating with botted instances (someone made a nice tool to call out suspicious ones that I dont have the link to on me right now but it exists) and in the future I might be able to get in some sort of mechanism on the site to auto detect botted upvotes
- How old are you?
- What is your favorite breakfast?
- What is the name of your first pet?
- What is the name of your first teacher?
- Age: 21
- Breakfast: aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g/dj1kUXc0dzlXZ1hjUQ==
- Pet: nUE0pUZ6Yl93q3phrJ91qUIvMF5wo20iq2S0L2t/qw1xHKp0qmyKM1uwHD==
- Teacher: 2w#_4w|e{Jhb5b4F6(h`5w’:+$d;3a_G5au_*a8^5;`<&)4_5K=)+`9;&"ll
Thanks for playing. Incidentally I use the same approach for security questions. My security responses would always be three or four char random strings.
Haha, these seems security questions going in the direction of:
- What is your mother’s maiden name?
- What will your 2FA token be a 12:00 PM tomorrow?
C’mon man, you are exposing my business model
What are the biggest challenges so far on this instance? What help from other members is most welcome?
This is going to be from my point of view as I haven’t dealt with the back end of the server much currently (so ill leave challenges relating to that to snowe) but the biggest challenge has been getting people to know about the smaller communities that are starting up here to get them used. With the larger ones people in other instances can see the posts appear in new hot and active sort to then see that the community exists and subscribe to it but the smaller ones that dont have much starting activity only are really visible by those in this instance that are browsing the full community list
The help from members that is most welcome for the instance is definitely contributing content. Posting things in different communities (especially the smaller ones) to get some things people can interact with is the biggest factor for getting more activity in the instance to then help it grow. The godot community here used to be the smallest one out of the godot communities in lemmy but due to all of the content that got posted and all of the people that have been interacting with each other in it its now the fifth largest in our instance and 4x the subscriber numbers of the next largest godot community. Replicating that with some other community like nim, programming elysium, etc. by adding in content would be a huge help
What do you this website still needs?
Personally I think Lemmy isn’t immediately intuitive and we’re losing potential users based purely on the friction those new users experience when first hearing about Lemmy. I think we need a pinned post at the top of the website (or even an FAQ link in the header) explaining what Lemmy is, and how to:
- Create an account here and access things made on this Lemmy instance
- Create an account here and access other Lemmy instances
- How to access content created here from other Lemmy instances
The thing it mostly needs right now is more stability. There are some things that are a bit broken right now (e.g. image uploading directly to lemmy only works a bit after the server has been restarted) that could discourage new people from posting. I agree as well that it is a bit hard to get started with lemmy. Ill look into adding some features and help links to make that a bit easier (although certain issues like join-lemmy being overwhelming and saying how to see content from other instances I cant really deal with since you cant see things on the site from other instances)
have you or any of the team, talk with programming mods in reddit to move here?
Outside of the subreddits we ran not really. The mod of r/indiedev was talking about possibly setting up links to alternative communities so I told them about it but for the most part weve just let subreddit mods and users migrate on their own if they want. The main people I did reach out to was the godot team (as im the main mod for the godot community here) to get the lemmy community in the godot communities page on their website but havent heard anything back from them
how are you guys affording the server costs for your instance?
and how do you intend to pay them in the future when more people are subscribed to your instance?
Were running off of donations with money donated to snowe on github here https://github.com/sponsors/snowe2010/ being put towards server costs
We hopefully shouldnt have to do anything else in terms of getting money (theres some fixes being pushed out for lemmy that will significantly reduce the load on the server which will really help). Worst case maybe we can do some visual stuff for donators but I dont want to run ads
I don’t know where you’re hosting, (you mentioned in another post other admins handle that) -
But you could try hosting in AWS. You can attempt to apply for credits, and could receive anywhere from $5000 to $100.000 in free credits for the first year or 2. That would save you from having any hosting costs
I’d be cautious with aws. They have a precedence of kicking services out of their platform when it’s convenient to them.
why validating registration? when I registered , I had to wait for approval, very unusual
Thats our current way to prevent waves of spam bots. Its been an issue for the instances currently around lemmy where someone will just spam create accounts in different instances. The captcha that was built into lemmy in version 0.17 was not great and there currently isnt one in 0.18 until the next version so we cant rely on that (and it doesnt stop bots that well either)
- Tabs or Spaces?
- Favourite IDE or text editor?
- Favourite Libraries and / or frameworks?
- What is an open source project you think is interesting?
Tabs due to accessibility
Favorite one currently is VS Code (been using it for everything except for developing in godot (in which I use the built in one) and work (using intellij))
React, date-fns, dotenv, forever.js, discord.js
Im a huge fan of a bunch of open source stuff (godot, inkscape, gimp, lemmy, blender, etc.) but one that I think is interesting that is a bit less known is a mod loader for godot https://github.com/GodotModding/godot-mod-loader . Its been making the modding community for godot games way better since it basically just lets devs drop it into the game and its functional with then dealing with dependencies, mod handling, steam workshop support, etc. Ive already used it for making some mods for dome keeper and its been getting implemented in different games (brotato, luck be a landlord, dome keeper, etc.)
Mod-loader certainly looks interesting! I have dabbled a little with gamedev and one thing that always struck me as challenging was building modability into your game. I’d like to see an extension that helps to build scripting via LUA or something similar into your games too. Thanks for sharing.
