I thought it was just a loooot of new users, thanks for telling me

Happy that you like it :)

Hey brave anonymous

ad1) We are not related to Reddit in anyway, we are open source lovers, no lock in, we want to create an ecosystem for open source authors … not another AWS …

ad2) Of course we do! Why do you always guess the worst?

ad3) Potentially? what do you mean? https://docs.elest.io/books/backups/page/overview We have several ways of doing and downloading full backups including the data and the software stack to be run anywhere else …

Finally, all backups are encrypted, so not sure about NSA or anything else …

Question for you: are you taking your pills as prescribed by your doctor? :)

Let me answer to this properly:

1. We have interest in Open source in general, not only Fediverse even if we also support Mastodon, Friendica, PeerTube, Gitea and also soon KBIN and Pixelfed
2. We contribute in code to some projects, and we also give back part of our revenues to open source authors partnering with us
3. There is NO lock-in, at any time customers can download a full backup and run their stack anywhere else
4. We (human support team) have no access to customers servers unless customers give us the permission and share access with us for investigation

Yes we do have specific instructions to make it work with Cloudflare reverse proxy (orange cloud) https://docs.elest.io/books/security/page/custom-domain-and-automated-encryption-ssltls

I asked ChatGPT to do that for you :)

So I made this forum to work on one specific piece of software that I think could benefit Lemmy (and the overall fediverse community) substantially. I’ll lay out what I want to make and why, in some detail.

I apologize for the length, but I can’t really do this without some level of support and agreement from the community, so hopefully the wall of text is worth it if it resonates with some people and they’re swayed to support the idea. If something like this already exists please let me know. I looked and couldn’t find it, which is why I’m making this extensive pitch about it being a good idea. But, if it’s already in the works, I’d be just as happy working on existing tech instead of reinventing it.

The Problem

In short, the problem is that you have to pay for hosting. Reddit started as a great community, just like Lemmy is now, but because it was great it got huge, which meant they had to pay millions of dollars to run their infrastructure, and now all of a sudden they’re not a community site anymore. They’re a business, whether they like that or not.

Fast forward fifteen years and look how that turned out. I think this will impact Lemmy in the future, in very different ways but still substantially. It’s actually already, at this very early stage, impacting Lemmy: There are popular instances that are struggling under the load, and people are asking for donations because they have hosting bills.

Sure, donations are great, and I’m sure these particular load problems will get solved – but the underlying conflict, that someone who wants to run a substantial part of the network has to make a substantial financial investment, will remain. Because of its federated nature, Lemmy is actually a lot better positioned to resist this problem. But, it’ll still be a problem on some level (esp. for big instances), and wouldn’t it be better if we just didn’t have to worry about it?

The Solution

Basically, I propose that all users help run the network. Lemmy is a big step forward because a lot more of users can help than before, but even in Lemmy, only a small fraction of people will choose to make instances, and you’ll still have big instances serving lots of content.

I propose to make it trivially easy for the end-users to carry the load. They can install an app on their phones, or a browser plugin, or run something on their home computer, but they have absolutely trivial ways to use their hardware to add load capacity. The load on the instances will be way reduced just from that option existing, I think.

I would actually argue for taking it a step further and having instance operators be able to require load-carrying by their users, but that’s a choice for the individual operators and the community, based on observation of how this all plays out in practice.

One Implementation

It’s easy to talk in generalities. I’m going to describe one particular way I could envision this being implemented. This proposed approach is actually not specific to Lemmy – it would benefit Lemmy quite a lot I think, but you could just as easily use this technology to carry load for a Mastadon instance or a traditional siloed web site. It’s complementary to Lemmy, but not specific to it.

Also, this is going to be somewhat technical, so feel free to just skip to the next section if you’re just interested in the broad picture.

So like I said, I propose to make peer software that provides capacity to the system to balance out the load you’re causing as an end-user. The peer is extremely simple – mostly it runs a node in a shared data store like IPFS or Holepunch, and it serves content-addressable chunks of data to other users.

You can run it as an app on your phone if you have unlimited data, you can run it as a browser plugin (which speeds up your experience as a user, since it’ll have precached some of the data the app will need), you can run it on your computer back at home while you access Lemmy from the road, etc.

The peer doesn’t need to be trusted (since it’s serving content-addressable data that gets double-checked), and it doesn’t need to be reliable or always on. The system keeps rough track of how much capacity your peer(s) have added, and as long as it’s less then your user has consumed, you’re fine if your peer goes away for a couple of days or something.

When you, as a user, open your Lemmy page served by the instance, what you get served back is tiny: Just a static chunk of bootstrapping javascript, a list of good peers you can talk to, and a content hash of the “root” of the data store

Please add some text formating, at least some line breaks …

We do use Stripe! I’ve just checked iDEAL require the transaction to be in EUR (make sense), and currently we bill only in USD, I’ll check with our team if we can add option to add balance credits in EUR :)

The smallest offer comes with 1vcpu / 2GB ram (+2GB of swap on NVME) / 20GB of disk (NVME), I would say it’s good enough for up to 50 active users. For the storage it’s possible to connect a Network volume to extend the storage up to 10TB.

Bigger plans have way more ram & cpu allowing you to scale to thousands and tens of thousands of active users.

Some people prefer to pay a small amount to a third party so they can sleep better knowing that experts are taking care of maintenance for them.

Origin of Elestio: we started deploying open-source software for websites and web apps we built, many for SMB and enterprise customers. Our process was basically: spin up VM’s from a hosting provider, install the software we needed, then update it manually / when it was needed / critical, etc.

Once we hit > 100 servers/services needing updates, backups, capacity monitoring and alerting, etc. we saw that it was getting totally unmanageable… so we built what would eventually become Elestio.

Managed databases is a solved problem (AWS RDS, Aiven, Scalegrid), but what about other open-source software? Marketplaces have apps templates for one-click deployments, but once deployed you need expensive devOps to properly maintain your software.

Elestio provides enterprise-grade, fully managed services for 200+ open-source softwares. 100x cheaper than using human devOps, 10x more effective

We are helping startups & enterprises from 16 countries to deploy/secure/maintain open source softwares at scale (some customers have hundreds of managed services with us), we are saving them tons of time and money by managing that for them.

Yes!!! KBIN should be ready this week (maybe today or tomorrow)

Yes that’s correct, with our smallest plan, price is ~0.01 per hour, it’s deducted every hour from the credits balance (or free credits when you are in trial)

FYI for people looking for a fully managed hosting of Lemmy, we do have an offer starting at $10 including the hosting + management fees, more details here in our Introduction post: https://lemmy.ml/post/1206609

Or directly on our website: https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy

Agreed, it feels really similar to Reddit but in better :)