seedling

That's basically how federated software has to work. Without defederation, running federated software becomes unusable. Either you get overrun by spammers or you become legally liable for illegal content from other servers if you don't do anything about it (the beehaw admins mentioned someone posting child porn as being one reason for defederation). Lemmy is clearly in its early days but this kind of thing will become way more common, as it is on more mature fediverse platforms.

Email providers are a good example of federated software. They have to make sure nobody is sending spam or malware or they will get federated, and they can be very aggressive about that.

Ultimately if you don't want defederation to ever happen, you want a centralized system run by a single organization. Those are your options.

Or you can have the government step in and have a very highly regulated system like for telephony, where almost nobody gets to run an instance, which seems unlikely in this case.

ha, if it turns out anything like mastodon, it'll be the medium to small instances that have the biggest amount of defederation drama. This whole thing is the most amicable defederation I've ever seen.

Small instances have otherwise been good for mastodon though

We've had a lot of success with that model on mastodon, as well as the sort of hub-and-spoke model where you have a larger instance (like beehaw) and a number of smaller instances that primarily interact with the larger instance and with each other. Location specific instances are also great for discussion, for telling people about events in their area, etc.

You could always start pretty small - basically if you could get enough people who want to have a Tuscon-specific community and who can be active, you could start a solid community, and probably survive off of relatively small donations at first. Once you've got a solid seed community it could be easier to grow from there.

I personally run (with a friend) a mastodon instance which is only for me and people we know IRL. While it's not what you want in the long term, it could be a good starting place while you figure out how to get everything set up and figure out how many resources you'll need and what funding you'd need. That way you don't have to solve every problem at once - you can open it up more once you're sure you have a solid foundation.

there are some, but they tend to quickly become spam and nazi instances. I'm guessing even those ones defederate from the instances that only serve malware though

I really like Mastodon, so much so that I have several accounts for different purposes. You do need to invest a bit of time into following a good number of people who post stuff you like, though. I was pretty active on Twitter and now I'm pretty active on Mastodon and I like Mastodon better, but I had to spend a little time searching hashtags for people posting cool stuff.

One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention is moderation - your experience will be better with a well-moderated, well-run server, otherwise you'll have issues with spam and maybe worse. Generally a medium-sized server based around a subject of interest or a geographic location works well, where the admins are actively involved in the community.

Hi everyone! I didn't actually use Reddit much, but all of a sudden everyone on Mastodon started talking about Lemmy and I thought I'd check it out.

I'll mostly use this account to talk about TTRPG stuff and the creative interests that I have around that, since this is the name I generally go by online when I talk about those things. I've managed to accumulate a lot of neglected hobbies - I'm trying to get better at drawing, I'm very much a self-taught beginner at linocut printing, I've dabbled in bookbinding and want to do more. In terms of TTRPGs I like a bit of everything, especially on the indie side, but lately I've been most interested in Into the Odd style rules light games and solo games.