Why create an instance if you are not ready to post in it?

Slow@lemmy.today to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 25 points –

Lemmy has many nearly abandoned instances. Over the entire period of its existence - several posts. Shouldn't the instance owner post content to attract users?

13

You've never tried getting into something, and then put it on the back burner when life got in the way?

My instance exists for me and my friends to use. It's not meant to attract anybody, it's meant to serve me.

It costs me nothing and I'm permanently in control of my data, and it'll live however long I want it to live, it updates when I decide I want to update it, if I want features I can just patch them in. When I make a PR, it goes on my instance first to try it out properly. I can post 10GB files from my instance if I want to, I'm the one that will pay for the bandwidth in the end.

I bet if you look at the profile of the admin of those "abandoned" instances, you'll find they're active on Lemmy. They just have their own private instance just for themselves.

Doesn't matter if lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or beehaw.org goes down: I still got all the content and they'll eventually federate out when they come back up.

How does it not cost anything if it's being self-hosted? Doesn't that cost money?

Guess I should have said it cost me nothing extra because I already own the server.

Although Oracle's free tier exists.

Ah ok I'll look into that, I keep meaning to learn how to self host, thanks

I'm also interested to learn self-hosting, it's the future of internet imho.

Yeah it's the only alternative I can think of to things like Google drive honestly

If it's only for your files you can already do that without hosts, using Syncthing!

I'm using that to sync my Zettelkasten and school notes between my laptops and phone, it's pretty nifty.

Are you thinking about a community? Because instance doesn't really need posts, it can be purely a user instance with no communities. If you mean a community, then yeah, it happens for various reasons:

  • people think they can attract people to it, turns out they can't
  • people sit on good community names to be part of the mod team in case someone wants to pick it up
  • personal problems causing people to have less time to moderate
  • possibly many more reasons

Do you mean communities? An instance is a server, like lemmy.world or lemmy.today.

If so, yes, I see interesting trending communities and once I go there, it's empty. At least say hi or something, people!

If you’re joining an instance based solely on the communities it has created, you’re not doing this correctly.