Hi. I’m new to Lemmy. Here’s what I’m wondering. How Lemmy servers are paid. If the person who opens the server no longer wants to pay this fee, the server has to shut down. How is this issue resolved?
It’s important to chose a instance with a reputable host.
Don’t go join your neighbors basement troll server.
Pick something that’s established, then they will typically not shut down.
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Single-user basement troll servers are the way forward in the fediverse.
Use ZeroTier or Tailscale tunneling if you’re hosting from your home network (fuck Cloudflare, all my homies hate Cloudflare). You can also rent a cloud server, put a VPN on it and tunnel all of the traffic to your homeserver without exposing the homeserver itself to the internet. Or just put the instance on the cloud server itself.
(fuck Cloudflare, all my homies hate Cloudflare)
I might be out of the loop, why?
Mostly centralization and monopoly concerns, considering that 80% of websites use Cloudflare. The data security isn’t great (Cloudflare can obviously access all traffic unencrypted) but the tunnels are free. I won’t yell at people for using Cloudflare, especially for the DDOS protection which is difficult for a smaller company to provide, but it’s always treated like everyone has to use it or else their website will explode, which gets annoying.
Very complicated
Noone said it’s gonna be easy. Besides, if you don’t understand that stuff you really shouldn’t be running your server anyways
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I have all of my domains under my name with WHOIS privacy enabled and I’ve never gotten a spam call or email from my domains. Your registrar won’t give out your personal information unless they have to comply, like a legal warrant. But if you’re worried about your particulars getting leaked somehow, you can use a VOIP number and PO Box address as your contact information, as long as you use your real name so your domains can’t be taken from you during a dispute. Registrars like Njalla and Epik also give you the option to list them as the domain contact so you don’t have to leave your personal information at all, and they’ll forward any messages to your account.
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I think an important part about choosing instances (across the whole fediverse, not just Lemmy) will be to inspect an instance’s plan for paying the bills. As you say, this stuff isn’t free and even the most enthusiastic admin isn’t going to foot the bill for very long on their own.
It seems clear to me now that the traditional way of paying for services via ad revenue doesn’t work for the end user. It is open to abuse by those selling the ad space, detrimental to the users, and ultimately doomed to… well, Reddit.
The only other viable alternative is a system based on user donations, with everyone contributing within their means, plus a bit of transparency on the part of the server admins. I’ve made my peace with having a small amount of money per month being my “fediverse budget”, a couple of quid here and there to support the services that I enjoy using. I hope that enough users also come to this realisation too.
Great points, def making sure to add this to the server docs somewhere. As long as there are users interested and Lemmy does not go full reddit I’ll be here and happy to support others who like a tech centered community for a home base.
