Hi all,

It’s been over a year and the folks hosting the XMPP Lemmy experiment at community.xmpp.net have asked us to start transitioning it to our own hosting.

I’m writing to see what the community would like to do, or if anyone wants to take over hosting? The instance was never very widely used, so I think we can probably shut it down safely as well without too much loss.

What do you think?

  • Sam@community.xmpp.netOPM
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think the general consensus so far is that the instance should shut down, but there have been a few commenters suggesting that they want it to stay. I tend to think people far undervalue the cost of hosting their own services, so to try and make it a bit clearer if someone did want to keep it up I think they’d need to consider the following factors:

    • Multiple people to cover the cost of hosting, this needs to scale with the amount of traffic
    • Multiple volunteers to handle operations, this needs to scale with the amount of traffic
    • Multiple volunteers to handle moderation and accept registrations, this needs to scale with the number of users
    • Someone willing to promote the instance (assuming we want it to grow, this may or may not be the case and it’s fine if we want it to just be a small space for a few XMPP projects), this workload will inversely scale with the number of users
    • Some sort of governance and accountability model; this would need to scale with the number of users

    Some of this we’ve gotten away without so far, and some of it can start small and scale to multiple volunteers later if the instance grows, but I really think you need a few people on all of them to prevent burnout and keep the community sustainable. I do think there’s harm in just leaving the community around to languish: this makes it a target for spammers if it’s poorly moderated, contributes to making the network look large but dead (as opposed to small and growing), and, if it becomes unstable, may create a bad experience for anyone using it when it’s down a lot and there aren’t volunteers to fix it.

    If we have trusted volunteers (or maybe we can find a way to hand over the database dump without giving away anyones personal data, reset passwords and purge profiles or something; this is less important to figure out right this moment and we can figure it out only if/when we go to do the handover) for any of this, I think we can probably hand the reins over to them. If not, we can’t keep the community going whether people want to or not :)