Edit edit: pls stop voting we already decided. read the post title. I love blahaj.zone and personally wanted to stay.
EDIT-I feel the need to clarify that I don't really care either way, I have no ambitions to be an instance admin, I just want to do whatever's best/preferredf or the community-
Hello everyone, I'm making this post because I have received a very enticing offer that I think we as a community should consider.
Ruud from lemmy.world has reached out and offered to set up our own instance under the domain of 196.social, hosted on lemmy.world's hardware. This would allow the community to exist as a separate entity from any one instance, while also improving stability, as it would not be impacted by The same volume of hacks or attacks. It would also not be affected by Lemmy.worlds downtime as it would be fully separate.
The one trade-off is that we would have to fund this ourselves. Ruud says he is more than willing to cover the costs initially until we get some sort of funding set up, but after that grace period we would have to crowdsource the money. He says that the expenses of running a one community instance are very low, however. especially if we don't allow account creation, so it would not take many people to fund it per month.
Please vote in the comments whether we should remain on blahaj.zone, or migrate to our own instance.
So, one thing I'd mention is the systems and admin work involved in running an instance.
This is on top of the community moderation, and involves networking with other instance admins, maintaining good relations, deciding who to defeferate from, dealing with unhappy users, etc.
Then there's the setup and maintenance of the servers, security, hacks, DDoSing, backups, redundancy, monitoring, downtime, diagnosis, fixing performance issues, patching, coding, upgrades etc.
I wouldn't be here doing this without @ada. We make a formidable team, and without any self effacement, we are both at the top of our respective roles with decades of experience.
Big communities also magnify the amount of work involved. We're almost at the point where we are starting to consider getting additional people involved.
Moreover we're both here for the long haul, with the willingness and ability to personally cover the shortfall in hosting costs.
I'm not trying to convince you to stay here. But in addition to free hardware, you're going to need a small staff to do these things for you, so my advice is to work out if you have reliable AND trustworthy people (because these people will have access to confidential user data) who are committed to do this work long term with you. Where will you be in 3 years, 5, 10?
Yeah it seems like Moss may be severely underestimating the work that goes into running an instance. You and Ada do a great job of running blahaj zone, and it seems pointless to move elsewhere and create more work for the people behind 196
I would like to acknowledge here that Ada and I, while being part of a marginalized community are both still very privileged.
I also want to make clear that I'm not saying that you need to have decades of experience, or the means to cover the costs by yourself, but rather wanted to point out it's a hard job and you need to have (multiple, qualified) people to do the job for a larger instance. There may also be times when the donations don't 100% cover the costs, and you'll need to have a plan when this happens.
Unfortunately multiply intersectional marginalized people have a lot harder time getting that experience and to have a means to fund such instances. It can additonally be a lot harder for them to find opportunities to gain this experience.
If you do find yourself in a similar situation, and would like an opportunity to gain some experience/training in a LGBTQIA+ / neuro-diverse / marginalized people-friendly community project, please message myself or @ada and we may be able to help.