Opinion: lemmy Instances should disclose basic hardware and infrastructure in the About section
When you choose a Lemmy home instance, you’re trusting somebody else’s infrastructure with your account, posts, comments, and uploaded media.
If that instance disappears without a usable backup or migration path, years of your contributions can disappear with it.
Yet when I look at most instances, I have absolutely no idea what I’m trusting.
Is this running on:
- A $5 VPS?
- A dedicated server with redundant storage?
- Someone’s mini PC under their desk?
- AWS with costs that explode exponentially as traffic increases and hapless admin not realizing that just shutting it down as they never had a plan?
- A database with proper backups?
- A server with no backups at all?
I recently had an instance tell me my posting activity alone was becoming too expensive for them and solution being just banning me and removing all my data. no im not kidding - thx lemmy.radio.
That immediately makes me wonder: what are you running? (apparently it was aws micro or something and person clearly had no idea what they were doing)
If a few hundred posts can create a meaningful financial problem, is the instance massively undersized? Are you paying hyperscaler prices for workloads that could run cheaply on dedicated hardware? Is storage the problem? Bandwidth? Pictrs? Database load?
I don’t know, because users are given almost zero infrastructure information.
I’m not asking admins to publish IP addresses, network diagrams, credentials, or anything security-sensitive.
Just put some basics in /about:
Hosting: OVH / Hetzner / AWS / home-hosted / etc. Compute: 8 cores / 32 GB RAM Storage: 2 TB NVMe Backups: Daily, retained 30 days Media backups: Yes / No Off-site backups: Yes / No Approximate capacity: Small / Medium / Large Funding: Self-funded / donations / nonprofit / etc.
That tells me infinitely more about whether I’m comfortable making an instance my home.
And honestly, backups matter to me more than the CPU model.
Federation gives us the freedom to choose our instance. Great.
But you can’t make an informed choice when you have no idea whether your digital home is a properly backed-up server or a $5 VPS held together with Docker Compose and prayers.
Instance infrastructure shouldn’t be a mystery.
If you’re asking users to build years of history on your server, give them enough information to understand what they’re building it on.
No. I currently support and maintain multiple accessibility repos. That’s my area of expertise, so the place most of my opensource time should go. Any server admin could release the system they created for removing old Lemmy posts. Far fewer can write accessibility tools and addons. So I spend my donated time where I can get the most impact for what I put in.