Sorry I missed this initially…

Is being a mod exhausting yet or are you able to keep up?

Not at all. I guess we must have very well behaved users because there have been zero reports so far.

How big would you want this instance to grow?

I don’t actually have a solid answer for this. I would say I want it to grow large enough to be healthy on a single cost-effective server for now. Single server because while some people are experimenting with load-balancing across multiple servers it’s not really an official supported feature yet and I generally want stability more than cutting edge features. “Cost effective” right now means I can just pay for the infrastructure myself without really thinking about the cost. If we keep growing, eventually it will be worth it to set up a donations page, at which point “cost effective” will just mean that donations roughly equal the costs.

Who are you using to host it (or is it self-hosted)?

I would call it self-hosted on Linode I think? The term “self-hosted” could mean a couple of things. I know of at least one turn-key lemmy instance provider but based on the reports I’ve seen on Matrix they are not a good experience right now. Anyway I want more control than that. But it’s definitely not running on a server in my basement. The way the internet works these days just makes that kind of self-hosting impractical IMO (also, I don’t have a basement 😀).

How much are you paying to keep it up and running?

There are a couple of costs. When/if we get to the point of accepting donations I’ll break it down in more detail, but right now it’s about $30/month and I think we have room to grow on the current server.

The guys over at corteximplant.com created a cyberpunk Lemmy instance at dataterm.digital but then got so irritated with the whole thing he deleted the instance without any warning. I certainly don’t blame him for doing it but now I’m wary of starting another cyberpunk community on another small Lemmy instance so I wanted to get your thoughts. I’m thinking about posting random nonsense to the !cyberpunk community here in an attempt to make it more active but I’m not sure if that’s something you’d actually want.

That’s too bad. I was aware of dataterm.digital. Didn’t realize they had pulled the plug.

I will say that I don’t approve of the “without any warning” part at all. If this instance were to shut down for any reason within my control, I will commit to giving at least a few months notice (preferably longer) and doing whatever I can to facilitate exports of any data we host. If/when moderation does become a challenge, hopefully I will be able to solicit some volunteers to help out.

As for whether I am going to get tired of it or get in over my head, I really don’t think so. I’m a computer engineer in my day job and do some basic sysadmin stuff as part of my job, so I feel very comfortable with the technical aspects of hosting this instance. At the same time, I’m definitely not a full time sysadmin in my day job so this doesn’t really feel like work to me. It’s a fun hobby and I think it will stay that way.

As far as content goes, I originally created this instance for myself because I wanted to avoid the load issues of the bigger communities and didn’t trust the smaller ones to stick around. (There are also questions of who federates with who, but I’m going to avoid opening that can of worms as long as I can.) I quickly decided that it was a waste to have a server running this just for myself, and anyway the way federation works in Lemmy it’s better to have some other users IMO so I opened it up for registrations. So first and foremost my mandate for this instance is to be a stable and performant platform for accessing the entire Lemmyverse. I’m not really a content guy so I’m not really going to do much to promote content on the instance, but I’m more than happy for others to do so. I think it would be nice if we could host an active cyperpunk community and I’m more than happy to host whatever niche communities the users here want to create for themselves.