Discussions related to Infosec.pub

Heya, I’m the admin for infosec.pub, along with a bunch of other fediverse instances including infosec.exchange. I’ve been on the fediverse for a long time - infosec.exchange turns 8 next month, for example.

With each event that disenfranchises people (twitter bought by Musk, Reddit API, etc), I’ve seen a big surge in new instances. My observation is that many people get into running multi-user instances without really understanding what it takes, time-wise, emotionally, and financially.

Some of the software, like lemmy, but also kbin, calckey, and others, get pushed into the spotlight before they’re really in a reasonable spot to support the incoming community. Lemmy is relatively well functioning and complete, but only around a core set of use cases, whereas some of the others were just nowhere near ready.

I don’t know of anything on the lemmy roadmap to add account portability.

In any event, I’m here for the long term, though I do have to keep reminding our user base that this service is free to use, but not free to run, and therefore donations are much appreciated though not mandatory.

These are some concerns I’ve had too, but I think there’s progress being made.

Currently, it seems for the account migration/duplication is a self hosted effort but something that I’ve been looking into making a site for.

As for the long term viability of these instances, I would say it’s pretty rare that a bigger instance run by good admins go down frequently. The costs aren’t usually that high and can be managed fairly easily. From what I’ve seen, these instances are usually donation-based “monetization” so if no one donates its on the instance owner to eat the costs. In theory, one could make some sort of membership based instance, but I haven’t seen anything like that. I’ve seen discussions that if an instance was to start running ads that users would leave immediately… and that’s certainly their choice. It just makes it difficult if an instance is growing but does not have any contribution from the community to run the instance.

However, when the instance that people have registered on goes down, yes, they lose their progress, comments, history, etc… there is no way to transfer that to another instance.

Currently, there is only a way to move subscriptions, that I’m aware of.

As for the list of instances… that should be “unique” per instance, because that is the list of instances that are federating with the instance you’re looking at. So usually it’ll show the federating and blocking instances. So as long as at least one account is subscribing to those instances from your instance, it’ll show up there. Larger instances don’t necessarily need to seed their federation, but it’s common for new instances to seed federation and to start getting material out to the rest of the Fediverse.