I’ve been planning out a FOSS solution for mod tools for a few weeks now. I’m releasing the design document this weekend and hope to break ground with the community on it. That’s great that you’re involved!

I spent about an hour just looking at names for an online community. I saw a bunch of other Lemmy instances with names that didn’t feel inviting. I was really pushing for something that was easy to say, remember, and engage. I had a lot of different ideas and subdomain hacks to try to find something like that. This was one of the final 5 I liked and ultimately picked it because I was also able to get utter.online for Mastodon. I thought they made a great team.

I have 15 years of development and sysops experience. Setting it up was more of a fun project for me. I started small with single server and then I kept saying… well what if I? Eventually, I built a pretty resilient infrastructure. I wanted there to be close to zero downtime and a snappy experience for users. I’m somewhat limited by how Lemmy is built for each of those goals; however, this is all changing as the project quickly picks up speed with the influx.

I’ve not seen an influx. The biggest move was when the /r/nerf subreddit migrated to my instance to c/nerf. Even that wasn’t enough to push the servers. I had built for a deluge. One problem with how Lemmy instance descovery works is they list the business ones on the top of the instance page. People naturally join those first creating a huge gap between small and large instances. If you didn’t get a rush of people early you’re somewhat in trouble to grow. I’ve been trying a lot of things to try to get traffic here. Speaking with the other admins, a lot of traffic is both a blessing and a curse due to moderation and server cost. (You cannot monetize Lemmy with ads or subscriptions, you must rely on donations).

Lemmy & the fediverse are a passion of mine. I thought of doing this about 8 years ago but didn’t think it would catch on. It probably wouldn’t of at that time. I have a somewhat similar social site I might actually finish that would go great with what’s currently available in the fediverse.

It’s best to watch out for the “baddies”. There are instances full of them that might just rush new or growing instances. It’s a struggle as an admin to block and defederate on Lemmy & Mastodon. Keep an eye out and report when you’re suspicious.

One great thing is that everything talks to each other. Signup for a Mastodon account and follow a Lemmy community. I have a special list on my Mastodon account to follow a set of groups. It find it easy to group subjects together.

Thanks for all these great questions!