It appears to me that the current state of Lemmy is similar to other platforms when they were smaller and more insular, and that insularity is somewhat protecting it.
I browse Lemmy, and it feels a bit like other platforms did back in 2009, before they became overwhelmed and enshitified.
If I understand it correctly, Lemmy has a similar “landed gentry” moderation scheme, where the first to create a community control it. This was easily exploited on other platforms, particularly in regards to astroturfing, censorship, and controlling a narrative.
If/when Lemmy starts to experience its own “eternal September”, what protections are in place to ensure we will not be overwhelmed and exploited?
How does one do this without hardware?
…. Acquire/rent hardware, or pay for cloud services?
“How does one cook without a stove”
Yeah no, I’m not paying to do what reddit charged nothing for
Then you should expect enshittified experiences if you aren’t willing to pay for them
Reddit may not have financially charged you but it came at a cost
Reddit didn’t let you host your own Reddit. Also, you don’t need to host your own instance, you can just use someone else’s for free.
“I want everyone else to do everything for me for free, I DEMAND it”
Plenty of people are ok with ads and such, and that’s fine. People who don’t want that may need to pay for the infrastructure of having an alternative platform. It all comes down to what you value more, and there’s no inherently right or wrong answer.
You’re not required to run your own instance on your own hardware; you’ve just got to find an existing instance with an admin team you’re comfortable with, create your community there and recruit moderators just like you would on Reddit.
Literally the only answer not trying to fleece me. Thank you.
? That’s a bizarre response.
No one here is trying to fleece you. People are suggesting ways to run your own instance as that’s the major difference between Reddit and Lemmy; you’re not obligated to use someone else’s hardware or be subject to their rules, you can setup your own systems and have a bit more freedom. Reddit doesn’t give you that option.
Your account is subject to the rules of the instance it was created on, as well as the rules of each community you’re interacting with. If you run afoul of the admins for your instance, you can be banned, losing access to that account completely.
If you were to run your own instance; no single admin could ban your entire account if you pissed them off. You can still be blocked from communities or entire instances if you don’t play nicely with others, but you won’t lose the account so you can still use it in other instances/communities.
For most people this isn’t really necessary; but lemmy also has a pretty large number of tech nerds that like to self-host our own services, so you’ll get quite a bit of ‘heres how you can do it yourself’ type responses.
Unlike reddit, you can just setup your own space on your own hardware completely under your own control, if you don’t like what’s available.
Fleece you? You act like we over here in a shady alley forcing you to buy shit.
??? How are the other answers trying to fleece you?
Take your meds
You appear to have asked a vague question and people responded on what they thought you meant with your question.
You seem to be interpreting that as people trying to take your money rather than seeing that what you are looking to understand and what people are answering do not line up.
Another user has already given you other information that looks like what you were looking for, so I won’t bother reiterating.
I just want to say that I hope in the future you’ll try not to assume people interacting with you are trying to take advantage of you and there may just be a disconnect in the conversation.
Regardless, best of luck with everything :)
You rent hardware.
The fuck I do
You didn’t need to stand up a whole instance to create a community.
I’m kind of sidestepping the point, but I think the average user will always be able to depend on the community to some degree, at least hopefully. All it takes is one savvy and willing user to support a huge section of community, bless the admins. If I’m being pedantic, most admins don’t own the hardware anyway, but that’s not the point. It’s not even the software necessarily. If it isn’t Lemmy itself, the spirit of independent web won’t go away. People will be always running Tor, I2P, fedi, I’ll even include crypto. The community isn’t the platform, it’s us.
I apologize for the uncalled-for Ted Talk.
I need to know a bit more what you are specifically asking to answer appropriately, but I’ll guess in the mean time.
I’m assuming you asking about starting an instance without hardware. My understanding is that many of the top Lemmy instances are hosted on server farms (companies) rather than self-hosted on their own hardware. Hosting with a company would be essentially renting their server to run your software (Lemmy). You would have control of all the software decisions (instance admin), but would not own the hardware.
I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the area, but the above is my understanding and hopefully that answers your question. If not, let me know and I’ll try again :)
Also, I believe the !buyeuropean@feddit.uk community just posted in the last couple days a list of European companies that could be used to host Lemmy instances.
Edit: added correct community and link.
So I have to pay. No thanks.
Infrastructure costs