Announcements

First, I want to say thank you for making Lemmy and for running this instance!

But, this "promotion initiative" strikes me as questionable idea for two reasons:

1. Having many instances hosted on the same infrastructure defeats a lot of the purpose of the federated model. If/when this infrastructure goes down for whatever reason, many instances will be affected.

2. If I understand your offer correctly, you're actually only offering free hosting for one year? So, after a year, if the admins aren't able to provide their own infrastructure, will you stop running their instances? This seems like it will inevitably leave a lot of users with a very negative impression of lemmy, when all of their posts and comments evaporate in to thin air.

Maybe the overlap between the set of people who are capable of running their own server and the set of people who would use a service like this is larger than I'm imagining, but I'm quite certain there are a lot of people in the second set who are not in the first.

It seems to me that a better approach would be to focus on making it as easy as possible to deploy lemmy, to encourage more instances on diverse infrastructure. (I see you already already have Docker, Ansible, and AWS instructions; as an aside, I recommend replacing the AWS instructions with a note recommending that users boycott Amazon...)

I could donate to fund such an effort if that could ensure more people could get this offer.

Question: it is possible to "migrate" a community from an instance to another?

We, a hosting cooperative in Germany, mentioned Lemmy in a book about free software that we published two weeks before. It is in German and targets clubs, non-profits, foundations and cooperatives. It's free to download. https://www.hostsharing.net/publikationen/vereinshandbuch/

I really like your idea of promoting Lemmy by providing a limited free hosting offer. It gives people the chance to find sustainable funding.

In the book mentioned above we recommended Lemmy as a forum solution. Many organisations like clubs are looking for something like discourse or flarum to replace a mailing list for discussions or a community help desk. If an organisation uses Lemmy for inhouse needs giving accounts to all members the instance is funded by the organisation – and thanks to federation the users can join communities elsewhere too.

This is the organisational approach to sustainable Lemmy instances.

If there is no organisation that pays the bills, I have to look for funding elsewhere, as users won't pay. I have to pass the hat around. But this is not sustainable at all.

Or I could go the usual internet way using ads to fund the instance. Is there a function in Lemmy that could be used as an advertising tool? A broadcast message by the administrator that is published to all accounts. Can instance administrators pin messages in communities? Or can administrators promote messages so that they get higher ranks?

I think of a Lemmy instance for a hobby targeting a community of consumers and producers where the producers are willing to pay for advertised postings.

that's really awesome!

what other ways are there to seduce users?

I am thinking about starting a lemmy instance for esperanto speakers or norwegians.

I enjoy following Lemmy's development. I will place an ad on several of my sites, maybe someone will be interested. We need to talk more so people know. A lot of people just don't know about Lemmy.

Shared here.

I feel lemmy just needs a general instance, for all people, no matter beliefs or nothing

Maybe not completely on-topic, but I wanted to ask what sort of resource requirements a Lemmy instance requires. I have a Kubernetes cluster I run for my business, so if it is not too heavy, I may be able to put an instance up with my excess resources. Thanks.