As promised, if I brought the instance offline, I would give you a heads up in advance.
Here are the reasons for me coming to this decision-
Moderation / Administration
Lemmy has absolutely ZERO administration tools, other then the ability to create a report. This, makes it extremely difficult to properly administer anything.
As well, other then running reports and queries against the local database manually, I literally do not have insight into anything. I can’t even see a list of which users are registered on this instance, without running a query on the database.
Personal Liability
I host lemmyonline.com on some of my personal infrastructure. It shares servers, storage, etc. It is powered via my home solar setup, and actually doesn’t cost much to keep online.
However- for a project which compensates me exactly $0.00 USD (No- I still don’t take donations). It is NOT worth the additional liability I am taking on.
That liability being- currently trolls/attackers are literally uploading child-porn to lemmy. Thumbnails and content gets synced to this instance. At that point, I am on the hook for this content. This, also goes back to the problem of literally having basically no moderation capabilities either.
Once something is posted, it is sent everywhere.
Here in the US, they like to send no-knock raids out. That is no-bueno.
Project Inefficiencies
One issue I have noticed, every single image/thumbnail, appears to get cached by pictrs. This data is never cleaned up, never purged… so, it will just keep growing, and growing. The growth, isn’t drastic, around 10-30G of new data per week- however, this growth isn’t going to be sustainable, especially due to again- this project compensates me nothing. While- hosting 100G of content, isn’t going to be a problem. When we start looking 1T, 10T, etc… That costs money.
Its not as simple as tossing another disk into my cluster. The storage needs redundancy. So, you need multiple disks there.
Then, you need backups. A few more disks here.
Then, we need offsite backups. These cost $/TB stored.
I don’t mind hosting putting some resources up front to host something that takes a nominal amount of resources. However- based on my stats, its going to continue to grow forever as there is no purge/timeout/lifespan attached to these objects.
I don’t enjoy lemmy enough to want to put up with the above headaches.
Lets face it. You have already seen me complain about the general negativity around lemmy.
The quality of content here, just isn’t the same. I have posted lots of interesting content to try and get collaboration going. But, it just doesn’t happen.
I just don’t see nearly as much interesting content, as I want to interact with.
Summary-
I get no benefit from hosting lemmy online. It was a fun side project for a while. I refuse to attempt to monetize it as well.
As such, since I don’t enjoy it, and the process of keeping on top of the latest attacks for the week is time consuming, and boresome, The plan is simple.
The servers will go offline 2023-09-04.
If you wish to migrate your account to another instance-
Here is a tool recently released.
I agree 100%.
Normally, I’d fight back on this. But, for this particular case, it’s easier to toss in the towel.
The second issue is a huge problem- because, its, actually extremely difficult to determine what your instance is hosting. Pictrs, doesn’t have an easy way of viewing the data it stores. In the past, I have ran scripts which will copy to a workstation, set the proper extensions, and make the images viewable… but, there are hundreds of thousands of them.
And, I really don’t want to take any chance of my door being busted down by the local PD.
I linked a PR in this post, regarding a feature to stop copying thumbnails locally, and that would be a huge benefit, and greatly reduce the impact of this issue. But, the issue of basically no administration tools remains.