Small instance with about 3 users and myself online for about 2 weeks.

pictrs   930M
postgres 1.4G

I run lemmyverse.org.

Space cows

Absolutely.

I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don’t ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.

As someone who owns their own instance, it is hard to get your instance recognized. You don’t have much content because of the lack of people, and it’s hard to get content if you don’t have people join. It’s a chicken and the egg scenario. Because of this some people choose to re-post content from Reddit to attract people over to their instance. It’s great to see the Lemmy community grow, but everyone joining a few huge Lemmy servers kind of defeats the purpose of the fediverse.

Like others have said, nothing is stopping them. That is why it is important to spread communities around to other reputable instances, so if something like that does happen, only the communities on that particular instance are lost.

I dont have much to add other than I am an experienced admin and was dismayed at how vulnerable Lemmy is. Having an option to have open registrations with no checks is not great. No serious platform would allow that.

I dont know of a bulletproof way to weed put the bad actors, but a voting system that Lemmy can leverage, with a minimum reputation in order to stay federated might work. This would require some changes that I’m not sure the devs can or would make. Without any protection in place, people will get frustrated and abandon Lemmy. I would.

I tried to upgrade via the instructions doing a git pull and then running ansible again and it totally broke my site with a server error message. I ended up reverting back to 0.17.4.

EDIT: It looks like they added some extra NGINX proxy stuff in there. All that broke my instance and I had previously just deployed via ansible following the instructions on their page. I would stay away for now.

There could be a few reasons.

• They want to copy over their favorite content.
• They want to try to attract more people to a community by bootstrapping content.
• They are trying to artificially inflate their instance for nefarious reasons.

Personally, I think adding some of your favorite Reddit posts is fine as long as you don’t blindly copy over everything from a subreddit. I have a couple communities that I brought over that I like, but without content, they mean nothing.

I belive > 50% are bot accounts, maybe more.