JohnnyEnzyme

I agree with the people urging you to do your best to take care of your sublemmy once you create it. On top of that, I also feel that most types of communities need you and/or others to be motivated promoters and content creators, even if you’re just pulling ‘best of’ content from elsewhere.

So-- IMO it’s generally best to think of it as a volunteer job. And from what I’ve seen, most community founders don’t necessarily realise that, and aren’t actually up to the task, hence the # of abandoned subs across the FV (fediverse).

IME one thing that really helps with growing subscribers is that due to the current size of the FV, almost any small community posting content on a regular basis is going to be seen by a fairly large proportion of the FV via the “ALL” feed. Whereas for example, that’s almost impossible on Reddit. It really helps!

] > https://discuss.tchncs.de/ is managed by the admin behind https://tchncs.de/ , as you can see, they offer quite a few services: https://status.tchncs.de/status/tchncs

Thanks; cool stuff. I just hope there’s enough resiliency and backup in terms of personnel, such that such projects can go on indefinitely.

] > In your situation, have you ever considered hosting a blog rather than content directly on Lemmy/Piefed? That might be an easier way to manage the content over time.

Well, there’s the rub-- by no means did I set out to create a blog-like project, rather that’s what it happened to drift towards over time. My main intent was to create as close an alternative to r/bandedessinee as possible due to Reddit’s self-immolation at the time. I didn’t want it to be about me, but about community participation, eventually with other people overseeing the project, with myself being more of an occasional contributor. This is doubly the case due to significant health issues and living in a place currently drifting towards… some pretty disastrous general outcomes.

But yes, I’ve tried doing a couple blogs for awhile. I frankly prefer the Reddit/FV approach because I don’t have to be as perfectionistic, ‘complete,’ and me-centred, plus it let’s me work more in a style intended to get general discussion rolling.

As I said above, if PieFed / etc eventually offered the ability to assign transferred content with matching usernames to the new account, that would pretty much solve things for me. Or if the community owner had the ability to modify old content (showing that in a public log of course), then it would also solve things. I don’t feel like I’m hoping for too much here, but maybe I’m wrong…

] > About the most robust and resilient instance, I’m not sure, monthly reports on !home@lemmy.zip are pretty transparent and detailed. Other instances like sh.itjust.works have very high uptime as well.

Yeah, the reason I say that is because Sunaurus had setup something like 10 sub-servers (most of them non-redundant) running the instance, at a cost of ~US$200/mo. I can’t pretend to be any expert in such stuff, but my perception is that (rather famously unlike certain other instances) it was overall beautifully able to handle massive influxes of users, DDOS attacks, spam issues, outage issues, and whatever else. It also had a health-status link (now defunct) and I think maybe other user/server tools, as well.

So while I grasp the intrinsic, resilient nature of the FV, Lemm.ee to me was one of the strongest instances there was, and it can never be too good when such as those go down.

To me, it also kind of touches on certain problems of dead communities only getting conserved in ‘ghost states’ by the FV. I mean yes, you can still see them if you know how to look, but they can’t be interacted with, and they’ll never pop up in any feeds. They won’t disappear, but I’m pretty sure that very few people are going to bother visiting them unless the content is absolutely stellar.

Another issue apart from that is that even when the content can be migrated to another instance, nobody can say with any certainty that such instance won’t crash, either. There’s also the fact that now that EGN’s stuff is mostly migrated (with ~160 postings lost), I can’t actually edit any of it even as the community owner. So personally, it’s another big chonk of work trying to patch up any content that has aging issues… such as Imgur content needing to be re-uploaded, info updating, and/or links needing to be fixed. I.e., I’ll need to delete, rework and re-launch so many of those aging posts when I’d much rather be focused on creating new content.

So from my POV, the situation is still a bit fraught, with the most obvious thing seemingly being migration tools needing to be improved, and community-owner tools needing a little more power. Now over on Reddit, people could say something like ‘yeah yeah, I sold my soul to Spez, but at least we don’t have any of those issues.’

So maybe if and when Reddit sets itself on fire again, the FV can be better-prepared to persuade users over. (knock on wood)

/rant?

My sense is that the article (and people in general) are dismissing the loss a little too easily. Here are my thoughts:

• IIRC it was the #3 instance by size in the entire FV. That’s not nothing, and a lot of people were no doubt impacted.
• It was probably the most robust and resilient instance across the entire FV.
• The site-runner was a real pro at technical matters, and notably helped other instances deal with tech issues early on.
• The reason why the place went down, i.e. burnout and harassment across it’s admin team, is something to be concerned about across the FV going forward. It’s also something of an argument that for-profit social media networks (such as Reddit) have some key advantages over volunteer-based, FV-style networks.