hello! this is just a thing i’d like to personally note. it speaks for myself, and where it does not expresses sentiments we’ve already placed somewhere else. this is not a moderator document or anything, and it will not be stickied.
i’m infinitely grateful that all of you have decided to join us here, and the community has had very few issues with moderation or general unpleasantness to this point. i’m also been greatly appreciative of the support this community has already given us both financially and with your time and energy in keeping the site up and well tuned.
with that said: please temper your expectations of what is technically possible with the website and be patient about what is. there are literally thousands of you to accommodate now, and a finite number of hours to do it with.
more specifically: we (the Admins) are four people, only two of which have actual experience running or maintaining anything in the same universe of what we’re managing now. we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities. Lemmy itself has very limited base functionalities, many of which we’re trying to work around or with and constrain us in what we can do or how. a lot of options we have at our disposal to make stuff run are binary, and a lot of the not-binary options are confusing.
we’re sure this will get better eventually, but from that point follows this reality: we simply cannot currently (and may not in the future either, to be honest with you) accommodate a lot of what you might think we’re able to do, or expect because Reddit had it either through an app or the base function of the site. this software hasn’t had 15 years to mature in functionality and community addons like Reddit–and while it’s their full time gig, the upstream software is still maintained by just two people who also run the flagship instance here. they have a lot of shit on their plate too; we’re lucky they can even take time to get to our notes!
and that last point also brings us to a final thing to emphasize: this is not a full time job for any of us and our insistence is that it doesn’t become one. i think doing this full time would be fucking miserable, personally, and i think i can speak for all of us in saying full-time working on this site is literally not something we can commit to. it has to be that way for this to be a solvent project.
if we split the balance of our donations equitably right now–all of which is site money, to be clear, we only use it for keeping the site online and paying for any labor we might source to someone else–that’d work out to just $500 per person, which is not even a week of compensation at a wage of $15/hr. collectively, we have probably put in well over full-time hours just to keep the site going this week, and we did that last week too. we expect we’ll be doing this all month. that splitting also wouldn’t account for our volunteers who do most of the technical stuff, who have probably put in even more hours than we have, and who i personally think would deserve compensation before we do. (our site would be kind of fucked without them right now.)
all this to say: please be mindful of whether what you’re asking of us is even possible. we are trying really hard here and it’s not like a lot of what is brought up is invalid (i generally agree theoretically with a lot of what people have been bringing to us), but at least during our influx we absolutely and simply cannot promise much of anything past “the site is online and moderated in accordance with our values”.
Thank you to everyone :
- Admins for doing a brutal amount of work for something they believe in
- Mods for keeping their own areas humming along
- Financial contributors for keeping the lights on
- Everyone who posts and comments for making this a nice place to visit
There’s this odd dynamic that turns up in all sorts of communities where people someone equate “person who volunteers their own time” with “person who has to do anything I want them to do”. When stated that baldly it’s easy to see the nonsense and yet somehow it keeps happening. Hopefully folks here won’t fall into that trap.
I can only imagine that making this work at all can be a challenge. The recent Reddit API intrigue and the user influx couldn’t have done any favors. My moderating and community management experience is much smaller, and I already know that was a headache. I’d figure that the team here is working on all cylinders to keep things running as they are. I look forward to chipping in what I can when I can afford to. In the meantime, for what it’s hopefully worth, you and the team are Witnessed and Valued. I for one am willing to keep patient through the hiccups along the way. We’re on to something exciting here and I look forward to its continued success.
Best of luck, keep on as you are 🫡.
I’m very mindful that a hobbyist project has now suddenly grown into something much more unexpectedly for you guys practically overnight. You’re doing a great job handling the huge influx so far.
Don’t worry about high expectations from fellow Reddit refugees like myself. Take your time and just do your best. I’ve had a great experience so far having smart, measured, mature discussions with other people. I can’t wait to have more. The only things I’m missing so far are niche communities that I’m sure will resurrect themselves over time.
Features and new communities can come later as the user base naturally grows. I think I’ll be here for the long haul and hopefully so will many others. You got this!
I think a lot of us here see and appreciate all yall need to do. I saw the coding request a few days after it was posted - I work from home during the week and would be happy to donate some time to help keep things up and running. I’ll keep an eye out - remember there are probably lots of genuine people here that would be happy to help!
Plus, I cannot even imagine the volume of work right now - like the holidays for shipping companies, or tax return season for accounting, but it’s four of you. As a peak worker, I send all my love lol
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Thank you for your efforts to keep the community positive and the site running.
Please take care of yourself and watch out that you don’t burn out. The one thing which is worse for a community than a stressed admin/mod is a burnt out one.
Your post sounds like (I am not a qualified professional, this is not a diagnosis!) you’re currently in stage 3 (of 12, so 25% of the way to the end) of burnout, symptoms being Negligence of one’s own needs (social contacts, rest and relaxation are no longer as important as before. One has the feeling that one cannot take time for this).
If that’s really the case, try to hear your own needs and take a step back once you feel it’s too much.
This is impressive thus far. Keep up the good work!
For anyone who hasn’t had any experience running a server of any kind, it can be a lot of work. I’ve run Minecraft servers for my friends, first on hosted services, and then out of my basement. For like 5-10 friends. There were times I was giving up my entire weekend to get the MC server updated, research, get plugins and mods working, speaking with support people, and attempting to fix it all when it broke. When we were using hosted solutions, we technically split the cost, but every month I still had to go around semi-begging for donations (we were a bunch of poor college students/new grads). When I started hosting out of my basement, I bought the computer to run it. It was inexpensive, but still money entirely out of my own pocket.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
So I cannot imagine what it’s like to run a public-facing service that has thousands of users. One that grew massively literally overnight.
we’ve gone from running this on a potato to running it on something actually respectable, and also from ~$12/mo hosting costs to a baseline of around $100
Really impressed with this place and how it’s run so far! I’m a software engineer and I’m currently taking advantage of a cross training programme to get passable at the infrastructure side of things. I’d be happy to donate a weekend or two here and there for the sake of BeeHaw if that’s any use to you? I can’t commit a huge amount of time at the moment but I really like this community and I’ll contribute where I can if it’ll help keep the lights on.
What are the main pain points with Lemmy’s backend? I’ll dive into the code when I get some time and have a poke around to get familiar if nothing else.
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I’m going to have to read up on how the protocol works in detail to be honest before I’d be able to say with any confidence what could and couldn’t be done but that would be a good feature I think. There is much less risk of ‘eternal Septembering’ smaller communities by swamping them with outsiders like /r/all does on Reddit here on Lemmy because affected communities can defederate at will.
ActivityPub has a concept of “shared inbox delivery” that could fit the bill, say, if federated instances delivered digests to each other and displayed them in a “public” tab.
Thank you for your work and commitment 👍 I used to operate and moderate a forum about a specific tv show in my country. You’re doing good work especially under these high pressure
Massive props to y’all!!! I set up my monthy donation already. When you went down yesterday, I thought, nbd, they must be dealing with a deluge, I’ll come back later.
Appreciate the hard work bub.
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Thank you for putting all that time and work into building and maintaining the server and community. I think you’ve carved out a great place for yourselves here and I appreciate being part of it (in some way or another). I’d volunteer myself but unfortunately I can’t help much with the technical issues and I’m very light on time for actual moderating duty, which I’ve also had to drop on Reddit. But I did set up a monthly donation to help with the costs of running this and I’ll probably keep it running until I stop using Lemmy, which might be never.
Thanks for being honest and transparent and I can only emphasise that you guys have done a wonderful job so far. Take a well deserved break as soon as you can please.
Thank you for the good work
There are at least dozens of us that sincerely appreciate you. I hope you see an increase in donations as I know it’s a primary way many of us can contribute to the community.
Let me try this again: THANK YOU!!! so very much for creating a community with kindness at the core!
