Looks like a fun place! Thanks for sharing.
Welcome. Fantastic photo. :) Got any more?
Ellie always gets BBQ. ;)
Haha wow. What an effective way to describe it.
Long term, I agree -- the whole point of the fediverse is to distribute the user base, moderation capacity, etc. Initially though, we're just trying to make it as easy as possible to for folks to discover lemmy and use it.
Sending them on a wild goose chase to find an instance and sign up complicates that. Getting them to come back the next day is also way harder when that experience sucks.
If folks can sign up on your instance and use it as their gateway to the lemmy fediverse, its tremendously helpful for distributing load.
The challenge is, letting people know your instance exists, and when they finally do and you get 30 signups per hour, scaling your instance to keep up.
Long term, you also have to deal with all the sysadmin crap (scaling up/down based on load, security and updates, backups, assholes that DDOS your instance because they don't like your moderation decisions, copyright take downs, legal requests, etc).
Hard to say -- so far on lemmy.ml, when the backend is overload, I can get pages to load (presumably from cache) but actions I take to change things (sign in, post comments or content, etc) result in an eternal "spinny wheel".
Yeah - its tricky. What I'm seeing though is instead of communicating that need at all, lemmy.ml and potentially other instance owners are just trying to push new users to smaller instances.
I am running my own mastodon instance in my basement - I've got other personal projects running in AWS, and work professionally in Azure. It sounds like you've got some great cloud experience as well. There seem to be lots of other similarly skilled folks here that can assist with deployment and scale automation (if that's what they need), or others that could assist by just signing up for $5/month on patreon to cover server costs. That call to action needs to happen though or else people wont do anything.
Its certainly featured on Matt's YouTube channel frequently... that dude is one of the reasons I own an XJ instead of a GMC Yukon.