I appreciate the effort in creating and maintaining this Lemmy instance. I don’t have any long-term involvement with or knowledge of FMHY beyond finding lemmy.fmhy.ml when I was leaving reddit, agreeing with the community values, and making an account. But I have appreciated this place as my portal to the fediverse, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.
As there have clearly been some issues in maintaining the instance, I think it would be extremely helpful if you were to create a simple blog to act as an out of band communication channel in the event that the Lemmy instance faces any further troubles. I understand you have divolt, but I have had trouble accessing it after initially joining, and in general it would be nice if there were a simple URL I could navigate to from any device with or without my credentials memorized/use of my password manager to see the status or any events that may impact the functionality of the FMHY Lemmy. If you have something of this nature set up already and I have missed it - that’s on me! But perhaps a stickied post pointing to it would help.
That’s just my two cents - and again, thank you for creating and maintaining this instance in the first place!
The biggest problem with having other platforms is:
- Another platform we have to maintain and manage
- Needs to be non-bannable (so no twitter/x, discord, so on)
- Needs to be at least usable (which is why divolt was chosen over matrix and IRC, and will prevent usability issues that we’ve had with firefish and lemmy)
If you can suggest a good platform that meets the last two, then maybe. But it’s pretty unlikely we’ll have another one. (I mean, Lemmy itself is already having problems and I’m pretty much the only person on it now, adding another platform isn’t gonna help with that.)
If we are talking about a simple platform to make announcements, you don’t need interactivity. That means you can go with the simplest option of all, which is in my mind a blog. I don’t know what your web hosting setup is like, but if you are running a vps you could configure your web server software to serve up a blog on a subdomain. Other than the issues with the ml TLD your site seems to have remained stable and available (unless I have just missed it going down). I’d reccomend Jekyll for its combination of simplicity, light weight, zero overhead and ease of use.
Is there a criteria I am missing or misunderstanding? Or a feature of your hosting setup that makes this not doable?
Edit: that might come across as pushy, which isn’t my intention! Even if it is doable with your setup I obviously have no place trying to demand that you do it, so please don’t take it that way
I’m in the same boat as OP- I’d never even heard of FMHY before Lemmy, and of the options presented I agreed with the values of FMHY more than the alternatives. So FMHY is also my portal to the Fediverse.
I agree with this 100%, but I’d add one key detail-
Please add another communication channel that is not hosted by the FMHY team or on any of the same systems.
The system at https://very.bignutty.xyz has not proven reliable and quite frankly while it’s very cool, during the big .ml domain outage, I found it hard to find the most up to date information. I had to find a few accounts that appear to be on the FMHY team there and bookmark them. It’s a heavyweight system, you need something very lightweight. And this system seems to have as much downtime as FMHY’s Lemmy instance, which is less than ideal for an outage notification system.
I’d strongly suggest something like Mastodon. One account, where all updates go. Pick someone else’s instance and make an account and use that.
See my above comment about this. (Also what instances even allow piracy? And which ones aren’t already blocked by everyone else, or would be trustworthy enough to not ban FMHY?)
First- thank you for your work keeping this instance operable. I know it’s not easy. Just want to say it’s appreciated.
As for my comment- I think you misunderstand.
I’m talking SOLELY a status update system for FMHY Lemmy and perhaps FMHY website too. The equivalent of very.bignutty.xyz. There would be no piracy on it or even links to piracy. You could run THAT on Twitter. Even The Pirate Bay has a Twitter account and they don’t get banned or blocked.
Think about it- of everything you guys post on very.bignutty.xyz, how much of it would get you banned from Twitter, Facebook, or any other anti-piracy centralized service? I haven’t seen a single thing. It’s all just downtime updates.So I’d say find a Mastodon instance that seems like they’d go for it, reach out to the admins and say we want to use you guys for our downtime tracker account, we promise no links to any pirated material only our own website and not deep links to specific piracy items. If they give you the go ahead, you’re good to go.
That said, interactivity is a plus but not a requirement. I like your idea of a status page hosted on github.
The important thing to me is that it NOT be on FMHY infrastructure, so it can still work if FMHY infrastructure has problems.We started running an Uptime Kuma instance on M4D’s servers. I’ll post any status notices there.
