So first priority is getting a list of admins so Tom can scoop them up on his King Arthur-like return. Or they can lead the exodus like Moses (other mythological analogies may apply):
I might be able to help out a wee bit. I have worked with servers before. I cannot make any commitments, though, and won’t be able to be fully responsible for any community type business -only technical
I think we should give this a week and then make plans to create a new instance. I’ve already created an account somewhere else, but I am quite fond of this instance.
I also like what I have seen in this instance and it’d be a shame to be forced to leave it. It also worries me a bit how dependent we are on individuals in some fediverse communities. I actually first migrated to kbin from reddit, but many of the communities/magazines ended up overwhelmed with spam or completely dead due to sole inactive moderators.
Yes, that single point of failure is one we have to address when Tom returns or we start a new instance. Short term getting a team of admins in place is critical, then we need to make sure the finances are solid so it can keep running as long as there’s interest in it.
That’s actually why I moved from Kbin over to Lemmy, It seemed much more healthy and thriving platform. That said, I’ve noticed (on feddit specific) that an awful lot of the content is coming through the same 11-15 people. Great effort on their part to grow the community, but I’m it sure how sustainable that is in the long run.
Oh, bollox! I hope this can get sorted out soon. I really like it here, so much nicer than Reddit. Plus I got to moderate a community!! Thanks @Emperor. I’d like to carry on doing that.
The “bus factor” is the minimum number of team members that have to suddenly disappear from a project before the project stalls due to lack of knowledgeable or competent personnel.
There are issues with several instances, from what I can tell. And they’re causing issues with moderation.
I won’t elaborate much more, as I still haven’t heard back from Tom.
But if they’re not resolved soon, we’re going to eventually have a big problem.
Yup. We might want to start thinking of setting up a new instance with multiple admins and try and migrate as many communities from here over to it as we can and keep the user base.
I’d offer to set one up but I don’t have the time to set one up or maintain it.
I think maybe the best action is to draw up plans for a new instance, in public on here.
That way, if Tom returns, the plans can be used to continue/help this instance.
If he doesn’t, then eventually the plans can be used for a new instance.
It might be worth having a discord/mailing list or similar, not for the planning, but to give a location for discussions to happen if the instance vanished suddenly.
I think maybe the best action is to draw up plans for a new instance, in public on here. That way, if Tom returns, the plans can be used to continue/help this instance.
That’s my thinking - I posted about it somewhere else in this thread.
If we can get volunteers to admin, then Tom only has to swoop in, promote them and we’ll get refederated.
If the worst happens, we have admins in place to migrate to a new instance.
It might be worth having a discord/mailing list or similar, not for the planning, but to give a location for discussions to happen if the instance vanished suddenly.
I started a feddit.uk Matrix space. It’s handy to have in case the server goes down for whatever reason (lemmy.world started their Discord server because of all the DDoS attacks and now have a Matrix space).
i have saved this matrix link as a backup, if things get bad here i will join
should we post this over to feddit.uk meta forum too? it might be good to have a “here’s our lifeboat link, you should join now” post present on that forum, while we still can?
i will join as soon as i have a clear head, i’ve been travelling for a thing the past 2 days, i need some downtime to get my mind around matrix, lemmy was bad enough lol. i’m aware it’s the same sort of fediverse deal. see you all there soon
Starting a new instance is an option, although it depends on finding willing admins and organising some logistics. I’ve had a brief look at the Lemmy docs for setting up an instance, and it doesn’t seem too complicated at first glance, at least for initial setup. I’d be more concerned in the longer term about handling (major) upgrades, given Lemmy is still a young project prone to large changes, and properly managing parts like pict-rs.
Anyone with a reasonable level of Linux admin experience should be up to the task, and I would think they would be easy enough to find in the Fediverse. I’d be potentially willing to throw my own hat in the ring, although I’d have to give it some more serious thought regarding time commitment.
There are other matters to consider besides the technical challenges, like funding, legal, and community management generally.
We should really only consider a new instance as a last resort though. I don’t know the current admin but it still seems possible for them to either return or hand over the reigns here.
I agree, we’ll see how it goes. A couple of us have emailed Tom and that should, hopefully, get him on here and we can sort it out.
Getting other admins onboard should be fairly easy (as Lemmy tends to lean to the tech savvy) but, as you say, we also need to nail down long-term issues to make sure the place is proof against any one person going AWOL.
Yeah, it’s tricky to know when to pull the trigger as Tom may spring into action any time.
I think step one would be to rummage together a few people who would volunteer to Admin this instance if we can raise Tom, so he can slot them in if/when he reappears. That would mean we can get refederated and everything starts ticking along.
I’ve run my own website and know PHP/MySQL but Rust is something I’ve not looked into. However, updating and doing admin stuff might be relatively straightforward. I don’t know. I’m also unreliable, so it couldn’t just be me volunteering.
I’d offer to set one up but I don’t have the time to set one up or maintain it.
Are you knowledgeable enough to volunteer as an admin here? I imagine duties are light and if we can get a few people onboard it shouldn’t be too bad
Tom was discussing more admins previously iirc. I think if that happens within a reasonable time, and enough people are added to keep responses prompt, the site will be ok.
However, if it continues with absence, it’s not a good situation. Especially when images are stored locally, all it takes is some malicious party spamming horrible images (or potentially even CSAM), and the site would be a smoking crater.
I think this is probably the highest risk, in my opinion. I honestly think Lemmy needs some automated solution to monitoring and scanning for CSAM content, because as a user I don’t want to exposed to it and as an admin I wouldn’t want to be in the position where I am responsible for censoring it.
I think lemmy.world have kind of made a good point here: we need an admin in place who’s reactive and willing to maintain the server regularly - in a moderation and a technical sense - or we should consider migrating to a larger instance.
This is no dig at @tom as he’s done a phenomenal job here and has undoubtedly spent time and money in creating this instance, but it would be good to get a sense off him whether he really feels he wants to continue on with the project. If not, it should lead to a larger discussion of where to go from here, because I don’t think the status quo is sustainable.
Tom was discussing more admins previously iirc. I think if that happens within a reasonable time, and enough people are added to keep responses prompt, the site will be ok.
Yes, it’s easily fixed, so no need to start panicking yet.
I’ve emailed Tom, I’ve spoken to some else who has used another email address, we’ll get this sorted. Hopefully, pretty quickly.
Yeah, it’s tricky to know when to pull the trigger as Tom may spring into action any time.
Exactly yeah. We don’t want to act too soon, but also leaving it too late could mean the instance gets defederated by other big instances and people leave for other instances.
Are you knowledgeable enough to volunteer as an admin here? I imagine duties are light and if we can get a few people onboard it shouldn’t be too bad
To be honest I don’t know what’s involved. I’d need to look into how hosting works and what’s involved in things like upgrades. I’m a software engineer (dotnet C#, AWS mostly) so it wouldn’t be alien to me and I might be able to help out on a temporary basis but I can’t really commit to anything due to time.
Given my level of technical knowledge, I can confidently say that I am unable to offer support in any way.
But I’ll second that this is a great instance – one which I’ve really enjoyed seeing grow and begin to pick up steam – and anyone able to step up has my gratitude.
Me neither. I may spin up an instance to have a nos around but I assume the general Admin business is a bit like the administration of a web forum in which there’s a backend with relevant tools and the settings, presumably a way to upgrade from there. I’m pretty familiar with that kind of thing over the years.
Access to the actual server is likely to be different again but if there is a web admin panel then getting a few people signed up to that should help at least resolve the current issues.
I’ve got dev/sys admin experience, so happy to help out, I’m just probably not the most reliable, but it seems like we would have a few candidates to help pitch in, so between like 5? of us (presumably including Tom), the duties should be light if we share the load.
I’ve read that 5-6 is a decent number of Admins for an instance as it provides redundancy and spreads the work out so no one person feels like it is too much hassle.
Draw up a list of volunteer Admins so if Tom came back he can slot some of them in and we can start the process of ensuring the long term survival of the instance. If that isn’t happening:
We spin up a new instance and those volunteers become the new admins.
We’re on the fall-back Matrix channel discussing it. So one way or another, we will sort it out. The tricky thing is when to pull the trigger. I was hoping the new update would make Tom resurface but that hasn’t happened and we have the looming 0.19 upgrade that could start causing problems.
Well this is a blow, as a Lemmy.world user I had no idea this had happened. Activity suddenly dried up and I assumed everyone had just given up on UK Lemmy. This is the first real issue I’ve had with defederation, and it’s not great that it happened so silently.
What is the plan if or UK lemmings going forward if the Feddit UK admin remains “absent”? World is the biggest Lemmy instance so it would seem a major loss to loose access to them.
Unfortunately this is one of the risks of federation. It’s alleviated on e.g. Mastodon as you must have more than one admin.
The last time Tom was not able to respond I asked about what happens. I was told that basically there’s no provision for this situation so all you can do is use a third party tool to migrate your account elsewhere. I was told that eventually hosting will fail or a manual upgrade will be needed then the instance will be no more.
I don’t think we could, Tom is either self hosting it or hosting it with a provider with his private account details. Unless he gives us those details so we can migrate it away to a different host then I don’t really see a way forward.
If Tom re-emerges he could appoint a number of admins and we could make sure funding is in place for the server costs. However, without him our only option would be to start a new instance.
This is a real shame, I like our little community here, but without lw content it is too small to be sustainable, in my opinion. Also factor in that there is no active admin, then this may be the end.
Yeah I thought this might be the case. It’s possibly a little pre-emptive unless there’s a bunch of feddit.uk users who are causing trouble and it’s just easier for them to do this, but it’s a bit shit that we all lose access to one of the biggest instances because they can’t reach our admin? They mention there’s other instances too, I wonder which those are.
I had noticed that Tom has been very quiet recently, we could definitely see if he’d be open to allowing more admins when he’s next around.
After his last quiet patch, he said that there would be more admins the following week but nothing happened. That’s one reason why people were concerned for his well being.
As far as I’m aware there haven’t been any major trolling incidents (unlike some recent additions to that list) and it seems to be largely down to having a single, currently inactive Admin.
It has been raised with @tom before but, obviously, this has become a bit more serious and urgent. I’ll do what I can to contact him.
There was the CSAM incident a few weeks back. It’s no wonder that instances will be cautious of other instances that have become unresponsive and lacking in moderation.
It’s a shame that people didn’t take Tom’s disappearance more seriously when it was first raised. Especially as there are concerns for his well being.
You’re right… The fuck? I don’t see anything on the announcements community about it?
Edit: I think world has blocked instances in the past where the admins are non-responsive, it happened with feddit.nl not too long ago, so this could be the reason why.
I’m 100% on board with instances blocking who they like, but I really think it should be more transparent than that. If we’re blocked, we should at least get a message that we’re blocked when trying to post…
I think they just need to be more careful - they’re the big dog in the park (larger than the other instances combined) and any action can have major consequences for everyone else.
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