Welcome to Lemmy NZ
We don’t have many members, so until that changes, feel free to subscribe to communities on other instances.
At the top of the screen click Communities, then rather than Subscribed or Local, instead choose All.
This will show all the communities (like subreddits) that are currently federated (connected) with this instance (site).
You can comment on posts in these communities and interact with them the same as users on that instance, and others can subscribe to and post in our communities too.
On the home page, try the “All” tab to see all posts from all instances we federate with.
If you want more information on Lemmy and how it works, see How does this all work, anyway?
Haha yes, it’s terrifying. We should probably plan for it. It’s hard to know how to plan for it, though!
Probably should upgrade from the $2/month 1 core 2GB RAM VPS it’s currently running on. Though it seems to be doing ok, oddly RAM seems like the biggest problem (larger instances say it’s CPU), but there is some stuff I can do to mitigate that. And it’s not really a huge problem.
It would be good to build up a userbase ahead of that time to work out when things start getting slow. So far I think most issues have been with federation, partly because of slow instances we are federating with but also some odd ones still unsolved.
If it gets to that stage - Patreon is a pretty decent way to get support! I’m supporting my Mastodon instance through there. There’s also an Open Collective thing https://opencollective.com/ocnz
Hey thanks for the thought, I’ve actually had a VPS donated by fediservices.nz so we should be sorted as soon as I can get us migrated.
Any donations can go their way: https://opencollective.com/nz-federated-services
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Yeah, most of the instances require approval for signups. I started like that, but reading threads about barriers to Lemmy/Fediverse uptake, I tended to agree it’s a step that the general public aren’t used to, and it’s an unnecessary barrier most of the time.
I know (from the Beehaw matrix chat) that they have started rejecting users as they are growing too fast and have an image in mind of what they want their community to be like. Probably if we get lots of new users joining all of a sudden then I’ll need to turn on sign-up approvals for a while. That lets us add people at a level we can handle.
From what I’ve heard, the database CPU usage is the biggest bottleneck for larger instances. I’m actually seeing higher CPU usage now, even though the site says 0 users online. Still less than 50% CPU usage though.
Edit: If I view from the homepage it says 7 users online. Perhaps this is why there’s higher CPU usage.
Edit from 3 days later: we’ve had 30 users online and CPU under 20% so maybe it was higher because of a background job or a bunch of logged out users.