We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team.
We have made attempts to contact the Rammy admins, which other instance admins have tried as well, to determine their current status. Due to their admins being absent and their unmoderated content growing in numbers, we will defederate from Rammy. If and when this situation changes, we will be happy to reevaluate our approach. It should be noted that any instances that have abandoned admin teams will be defederated.
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how does that work - I mean, who’s paying the bills for the instance if it’s unmoderated? weird
Probably a self-hosted server.
What’s that? It’s on somebody’s property. Someone is paying for power, connectivity, and air conditioning.
The host is on vacation and has no backup admin.
Damn, not sure if this is a joke or speculation, but imagine the shit storm they’re gonna come back to. I kinda feel bad for them if they didn’t intend for this to happen and the cleanup they’ll have to do, but at the same time, they kinda shoulda made sure they had a backup, or at least closed sign-ups while they were gone (assuming it wasn’t a medical emergency).
They could be in the hospital or anything if there’s only one.
Definitely a nightmare to come back if that’s the case.
Brings back bad memories of so much work on Ark being undone by griefers…
Speculation, I have no idea what they can up be to
I host my instance in my house on my old PC. I’m going to pay my power bill either way. It actually autopays. So if I had a medical emergency and couldn’t do my admin duties, my instance would keep on going for a very long time.
I don’t have any users on my instance other than me, so I don’t need to worry about this specific thing. But paying the miniscule amount of power that my server consumes would be trivial.
What’s the benefit of running your own instance?
As someone who hosts a small instance, nothing massive…
Honestly, nothing.
The only benefit I get- is full control over weather my instance is up or two. I know for absolute certain that my instance isn’t going to randomly shutdown, and not come back online.
I also have the benefit of having a lot of control over how fast my instance is, and performance optimizations as needed to make it perform as I would like. As such, for me, the performance is outstanding.
With that said,
Basically everything else is downsides.
Having to proactively moderate content originating from your server, is a drag. The moderation tools in Lemmy are absolute dog-shit. Your only option here is to use either 3rd party tools (lemmy-helper), or to just run database queries.
PictRS just keeps growing and growing. pictures gets synced to every instance, and those take up room. Lots of room. PictRS has even less moderation tools then lemmy. If you want to make sure your user aren’t uploading illicit/illegal content, is a major pain in the ass. My solution was to run a few scripts to fetch all of the content, and just run it through some AI scanning software to attempt to detect bad content. But, still, a pain in the ass.
Those attacks you read about here on lemmy world. Those happen to our smaller instances too. Every time you hear @ruud@lemmy.world doing an update here- we are also working on plans for updating the instance. Granted- my small user base makes these upgrades much easier and faster. But- we will have to do these updates. (At least on the plus side, my instances isn’t constantly under a DOS attack, due to a disgruntled member, or due to a pissed off instance which was defederated)
And, lastly, one downside of lemmy- things don’t really go away or get cleaned up. Your database and storage will continue to grow and grow, and grow. Again, to restate, There are basically no moderation or administration tools included with lemmy. You can see reports. You can ban users. And, you can delete posts. Thats about it.
There isn’t an easy way to even list users, comments, posts, or activity happening on your instances… through lemmy itself.
On top of those other issues, lemmy is very chatty, network wise.
Here are the incoming stats, from my “small” instance.
In terms of outgoing, it’s very chatty there too. You will find all sorts of weird and random outbound DNS records.
tldr; Its prob not worth hosting your own instance, unless you just really like playing around with infrastructure, networking, databases, and digging through application issues.
Personally though- I enjoy the challenge, and that is one reason I keep doing it.
Thanks for your insight, that was really cool to read about
good comment, appreciate the insights. This actually shows how much more work has to be done to let Lemmy scale safely…
There are third party solutions which helps a bit.
For example, Lemmy-helper from RocketDerp. https://github.com/RocketDerp/lemmy_helper
But, I’d imagine with this recent growth, its only a matter of time before better administration and moderation tools start appearing in the native GUI.
As someone who has done similar things professionally, I am not envious.
Is /c/bestof a thing yet?
I am sure it exists somewhere. If not, you can always make it!
I don’t need to worry about the instance going down due to attacks, because no one is going to spend their time attacking an instance with one person. They want to attack an instance with everyone.
I also don’t need to worry about defederation drama. If I’m not subscribed to any communities on those problem instances, I don’t even see the problem, and my server doesn’t rehost those problems. I was originally on lemmy.world, and then Beehaw defederate with lemmy.world. But I wanted to see Beehaw’s content. Now I can see both. No one is going to defederate with me because no one on my instance (literally just me) is doing anything that would get us defederated.
I also don’t need to wait for my instance to update to get new features. I literally just update my instance as soon it gets posted to Docker Hub.
I also just find it fun to host my own! I already had my domain name and wasn’t using it for anything. I already had a server ready to go. So why not?
You may still get content from problem posters from those instances coming via other instances that have federated with them. I make some tools for small Lemmy instances, and while I haven’t posted this one yet, Lemmy Defederation Sync might be a good one for you: https://github.com/fmstrat/lds. LCS and LPP are there, too.
I guess I worry about when it happens. I haven’t seen anything like that yet, so I see no point in doing anything about it.
In my case, the major upside is that I make federation choices, not someone else. I prefer to be as openly federated as possible.
Hi bilb, this is blab. I just wanted to say thank you for your approach. You run a wonderful server.
I appreciate that. Always great to hear from you, blab!
Somebody might be getting a nasty AWS bill at the end of the month.
Mmm weeks, delicious
Huh, don’t know what that was about. Edited.
Ok but it could be a raspberry pi chilling in someone’s house using utilities they already pay for anyway.
I imagine a lot of people have jobs where it would be trivial to set something like this up on company resources under the radar and then lose access / get laid off without the company ever knowing it’s running
This is pretty unlikely. Any competent IT department would notice an externally facing project.
I think its more likely that its on a vps or something and they just paid for like a year upfront.
No. It’s very likely. Not every company is run like a FAANG company with everything under a microscope. At your average company, it’s extremely common for individual teams to just have their own cloud service accounts for internal team use, not as tightly controlled as a company’s production cloud services account. I’d argue most of them are very loosely managed by a single person, letting said person do pretty much whatever they want.
And if those accounts have thousands of dollars in AWS credit or something, this could run under the radar for up to 6 months uninterrupted, depending on when the credits expire. Most credits are handed out for free from the cloud service provider with no cost auditing or anything of the like.
I’m in a position where I could do this myself at work with very low risk of getting caught. I just have no interest in doing so, and I’d rather not be fired if I did get caught. But it’s definitely possible.
Possible does not equate to likely. Its a pretty ridiculous scenario to assume when its much more reasonable to suspect that its just being hosted on a stable system and paid in advanced.
At mine, we get our own personal public dev sites which can host whatever code & software we like, alongside the products we develop and their APIs.
Totally possible to set up a lemmy instance and nobody would know, but not worth losing a job over at all if caught.
Yes, but if someone already has the server running, starting another virtual server isn’t going to cost them much.
It’s not like it’s a physical server, just running that single service.
That didn’t answer the question at all lol
I think they mean it’s just running on someone’s homelab. So there is no real monthly billing.
Edit: so the IP belongs to contabo.com hosting. They provide cheap vps instances with 4 cores, 8gb ram, 50gb nvme and 32tb of monthly traffic which is plenty to start hosting a Lemmy instance. Could be they paid for a year and went on holiday or something like that. Who knows
That’s… not how bills work. Someone has to pay for the electricity, internet traffic / connectivity, and rent / mortgage for the server to exist somewhere. That’s true whether it’s self-hosted in someone’s basement or in a data center somewhere.
You technically aren’t wrong.
But, in my case, I already had all of the capacity paid for regardless. I’d say, lemmy runs me around 20-30w of load total.
30w * 24 hours * 30 days = 21,600Wh / 1,000 = 21Kwh * 0.08c = 1.68$ per month.
In reality, the power load is quite a bit less, and my calculations don’t account for the solar panels on my roof.
Given, I have around 140-160T of total storage capacity, its not really worth putting a price on the small amount used by lemmy. My internet is paid regardless, and lemmy usage is typically pretty low (typically measured in Kb/s). So, not really worth putting a price here, as it averages less then 1% of my total connection.
If, I wanted to put a price tag on it, my labor to actually support and maintain it, would be where all of the money went to.
Contabo’s sign up page lets you pay for up to 12 months at a time, in advance. It’s quite possible they paid for a year, set it up, and then forgot about it or haven’t been able to administer it for other reasons.
That’s… not how servers work. If you are running a home server with hypervisor, which a lot of people are, starting a virtual server probably doesn’t cost you more than $1 a month.
I’m still trying to understand what he means with the rent or mortgage thing… Of course there is a cost but he doesn’t seem to understand how something like that easily stays under the radar… you are not going to notice it when a certain bill goes up for the little bit it costs to self host or what impact it will have on your mortgage… There are things like data usage that will be easier and clearer indicators
It doesn’t make any sense, the most they are realistically paying is €6 a month, and that is if they rented the VPS specifically for running Lemmy, in all other scenarios it is basically free.
It’s not like you can turn off the server and call the bank and tell them now you don’t have to pay the mortgage, your overhead stays the same if the Lemmy service is on or off.
As if everyone running a home server has proper monitoring. You think running an instance is going to make a noticeable difference on your electric bill? Mortgage for the server?
I checked the IP and it’s hosted on contabo.com
In which case, it’s probably €6 a month bills.
Yeah, could also have paid for a year upfront
Maybe it’s not actually abandoned. Just providing plausible deniability that way.
It’s running an older version of Lemmy, so it’s not being updated.
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Rammy is running 0.18.0 which still has the bloated postgres database issue, so storage should be ramping up real fast. It is still technically possible to forget about it, don’t get me wrong. I was merely pointing out it is not the only possibility.
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Could somebody set an instance up on a nes
I think that in order to run Lemmy you’d need at least a PlayStation.
Nah mate, PS2 at minimum, and only with a fresh memory card
No worries, I took no offense.
Technically yes one could, absolutely. No disputing that. Automatic defederation is not a thing afaik, so it would stay federated.
I run a script daily on my instance to defederate suspicious instances (no post but thousands of users for example) but not everybody does.
Yes, anyone can make their own server, if you couldn’t, it wouldn’t be decentralized.
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Yes, but lemmy isn’t the most stable of software, so unless you set up stuff like automatic database maintenance and restarting lemmy if it becomes unresponsive, it’ll crash pretty quickly.
I guess it depends on how many people use the server, if no one is using it, I don’t think it needs a lot of resources.
I’ve seen people say their server was growing with around 1 GB a day in terms of disk space, 1 TB free disk space would probably last a really long time before you ran out of disk.
It’s not necessarily super expensive for someone who wants to host an instance, whether it’s at home or via server providers. Hosting a GOOD and high-traffic instance might cost more but still any nerd with disposable income can do it if they want.
that instance is full to the brim of crazies who have lost all grip on reality. they feel nothing but hate
Lemmys that have been touched by the Warp and fallen into Chaos.
It got really bad just over the past two days. I’m not sure if it’s a raid from some right wing troll farm, or what it is. Defederation makes things easy though
Apparently it came from Exploding Heads, an instance that Lemmy.world already defederated from.
Yeah I’m seeing those shitters in my feed, guess my instance is federated with them still
Yeah but defed has an issue where it might just lead to bigger echo chambers for the users.
Don’t like this view, defed the instance and so and so forth. I think defed should only be used for last resort action like in this case an awful lot of spam. Just because their political views are left, right or center shouldn’t be used as reason for defed.
What about how these assholes were harassing LGBTQ+ users with hate? Defederation was called for and urgently needed. That behavior is indefensible and breaks site rules.
Not really an issue. If you want to see this content from defederated instances that everyone else finds obnoxious or disruptive, then you can either browse from an instance that doesn’t defederate that content, or spin up your own personal instance to browse from. It’s easy to move to a different instance. Your choice.
What makes it possible right wing and not just a troll farm? Sincerely curious why make the divide and note.
EDIT: I checked it out, I see the issue with Rammy. And yes, there is a lot of spam/hate fest, it’s not that all right wings are extremist just as much as “left wing” isn’t all extremist. We’re all people in the end and imo we shouldn’t let it divide everything further by labels and stereotyping.
It’s the same people from exploding heads that are in these threads. They circumvent the defederation by taking over another instance.
Who are those guys? They posted a thread on my instance trying to get people over to exploding heads… They don’t seem to have all their horses in the stable, if you know what I mean.
Nazis. And while bot the sharpest pencil in the box, they’ll keep coming.
And defederation is necessary to stop more recruitment/indoctrination of the lowest common denominator, who are very susceptible to appeals to emotional reasoning and propoganda techniques.
I’m fresh to lemmy so know very little in relation. But put that way makes more sense. Group of known trolls who move one to another to degrade and break the network.
Isn’t it possible to enable an automod feature for keywords or something across lemmy? I would image that would help.
Not across instances every instance has to define those themselves.
We have an automod bot that is being developed by @Rooki@lemmy.world that would take care of a lot of these issues though.
Hi there, what do the symbols before and after your username mean? I’m in Jerboa. I see silhouettes of orange and pink shields?
Moderator and Admin badges
I love how 2 people downvoted you for that answer! Haha what the hell?..
It’s like they see the admin badge and reactionary downvote.
Well I know at least one of them is downvoting almost everything I post. I PM’d if they wanted to talk about it :D
Probably a butthurt toxic user from a defederated instance…
idk at this point I don’t want to associate with some people. Being divided sucks but being united might actually be worse.
Not just that; at this point it’s impossible to dismiss that State-sponsored actors are a thing and must be considered in our threat models. If an instance is unmoderated, be sure for-profit trolls will arrive and start wreaking havoc there.
Mmmm
Idk man I’m not convinced it’s the theory’s fault and not the implementation.
In other words, if people were more respectful of each other and were more understanding of the difference between real objective truths and subjective opinions, it wouldn’t be so bad. However with how high the stakes are for a lot of these various discussion points I can’t blame them and people want to do the right thing and fight loyally for their own side which translates to aggression for most (sadly)
Idk man bein a human is complex
I would not support uniting with those trolls in any way. I had not even looked at it beforehand. I agree that being divided sucks. But I think it’s important to remember that there are still good people out there, even if we don’t agree on everything. We need to find ways to come together and work towards a better future, even if it’s not always easy.
If I create a social media account and identify as left-leaning, I am bombarded with extremist right-wing content. The opposite is true if I identify as right-leaning. This has ruined social media for me, which is why I immediately blocked the news and political communities on Lemmy.
I do not identify as either left-wing or right-wing. I share views that are generally considered to be down the middle. This is true for the majority of people I know, who used to be called independents but now undecided. I guess thats why when an entire group is called out, it rubs me the wrong way.
Nah, you’re not gonna muddy these waters, the right by far outweighs in terms of extremists.
They’re literally conservative religious people. It isn’t rocket science just look at the Middle East
Muddy what waters? Maybe see more of my replies for context.
Who are we talking about “They’re literally conservative religious people”, as in the rammy trolls or everyone right leaning? Because I already agreed the 20secs I saw the homepage it was unmodded, uncensored crazies.
Where does the middle east come in here, you say it like I’m already supposed to know. I also said, I block news and politics, left other social networks because of all the politics.
I started this as in, why divide and basically make tribes like “Anyone in a different party is bad”. And I never said left or right was worse, I said I’ve had the bad luck from coming across both but that don’t mean all left or all right is all bad…
Sure I can clarify!
So when you said “why does it have to be a right leaning and not some other side” and then said in your edit that not all of one side is bad - it eludes to your point being (from what I understand) “it wasn’t right to assume it was conservatives”
I’m arguing that they are largely responsible for extremism and are likely correlated to strict conservative religious upbringings. I then provided an example of the Middle East and terrorism in general correlating (in this case directly) with strict, dominant religious upbringings (I made this last term up, I just mean religions that expressly condone other religions)
Could you link where I said “why does it have to be a right leaning and not some other side” such as you quoted, I didn’t mean to put it that way, because my point is I hate sides, especially bad apples poisoning the whole barrel (left or right). What I said was:
“What makes it possible right wing and not just a troll farm? Sincerely curious why make the divide and note.”
And in regards to my edit, I explained in one reply that I’m new here (https://lemmy.world/comment/2127411). And now I see I probably should’ve added that in my edit as well that I was coming at this literally being fresh to lemmy with no history and trying to understand why ppl were bashing all right wing with this group. After this reply https://lemmy.world/comment/2126263 I had more background on the fact that it is a known group that does this often.
However, I have still defended that correlating a bad group (as I agreed with multiple times) that is part of a large group makes the whole group bad, I don’t believe is a good way of looking at it imo.
It’s not necessarily going to be an accurate judgment but it is likely that you will be correct if predicting (that means purely predicting, not taking any real action or indirect action, only guesses) which is what the commenter you responded to was doing.
Generalization when used to prejudge someone’s character and taking action, especially serious action is very bad. But predicting the responsible party of an openly hateful and vile event based off previous events is just fine. It should not ever be labeled as fact without evidence however.
Don’t worry about being new, it’s all good we’re just havin a discussion. The quote I did originally was supposed to be by understood summary of what you were saying but I only said that for the second point I made and didn’t go back to fix it - sorry about that
I didn’t look to much into it. I don’t want to see that sort of content.
Though not many people the right are trolls, the trolls are very loud. And on Rammy.
Yeah, I don’t blame you. It didn’t take more than 20 seconds on the homepage for me to leave. Those posters are by far extremist, conspiracy nuts.
Nah, call the alt-right extremists out for what they are. Tankies too.
If you’re a reasonable conservative, you shouldn’t feel called out by condemnation of the extremists.
Thank you for the update, seems like a reasonable approach
Unfortunate but very much necessary to stop the spread of their hatred. This is why it’s important to have a team of admins, so that it’s less likely that the person running the server doesn’t just disappear one day and they can continue maintaining it even if the main person isn’t there. Maybe if you’re an individual instance you can’t afford to hire a team of people, but you could get a group of friends together and have all of you work together to run it, think of it like a group passion project it’s important to make sure that something like this doesn’t end up abandoned otherwise it can cause problems for others if people start abusing it.
I know a lot of people are in doubt about how bad it is, but I went there and I looked at it and it’s honestly terrible worse than the Donald on Reddit (if anyone can remember that) we don’t want to rehost that kind of stuff on this server, we don’t want to be associated with those kinds of people, it’s not worth it. They can still have their free speech on their platform, just not on our server and we don’t have to put up with it.
Yes they can keep their hate on their own instances but they are not welcome in our house. Keep reporting these extremists wether they are right of left wing - because it’s a never-ending fight.
It’s interesting that they have their own instance, but can’t stand the fact that they got defederated, and have to keep finding ways to get that sweet attention they crave.
That’s why it is important that everyone keeps reporting these things.
Question here. If a user suscribed to world wants to keep seing content from that instance, cant he just suscribe to some subs over there? I’m still trying to figure that part out. I’m on ml but can see some content from world.
No, you will not see content from Rammy on LW. If you want to interact with both you’ll need to have an account on an instance that federates both. I’m sure there are some out there, and if not starting your own is an option.
And this, I feel, is one of the biggest issues with Lemmy…and unfortunately one that I could easily see being its Achilles Heel and ultimate undoing as a viable, sustainable model in the long term.
I think it’s one of the best things about it.
neigh. I think its one of the best.
Want ot make sure your instance is up, and is predictable and federated? Heres a guide
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Roll your own
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Dont troll or be a dick and you wont get deferated. Bigger instances have better things to worry about
As it sits things like the downtime, the porn spam to random@kbin, the federation drama have left me largely unaffected. I get to see what I want based on my subs and nothing more. If someone is trolling me I can even ban them and still see content, without their comments or contributions.
Im not reliant on a large corp to decide im worthy. I get to have downtime on my clock. etc.
Indeed. As long as you have a DNS name available it’s pretty easy to roll an instance, lemmy-ansible will do the work for you.
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That’s not what they asked though.
The question wasn’t that self-centered, it was asking if a user from an instance that defederated from another instance could still access content from the defederated instance through a direct manual subscription.
Fair enough!
Agree, keep us updated
Never even heard of it, but good looking out!
Good
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No, no, no. Clearly Rammy needs the enlightened guidance of Dot World. We must anschluss Rammy into the Greater Dot World.
So much drama I see on lemmy in one month than reddit in 10 years.
Time for me to leave Lemmy.world for good.
Are we at an airport?
And nothing of value was lost
Airplane to Fuckville leaving at 9am.
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