We recently received a message from a concerned Rammy user regarding their instance not having an active admin team.
We have made attempts to contact the Rammy admins, which other instance admins have tried as well, to determine their current status. Due to their admins being absent and their unmoderated content growing in numbers, we will defederate from Rammy. If and when this situation changes, we will be happy to reevaluate our approach. It should be noted that any instances that have abandoned admin teams will be defederated.
how does that work - I mean, who’s paying the bills for the instance if it’s unmoderated? weird
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What’s that? It’s on somebody’s property. Someone is paying for power, connectivity, and air conditioning.
The host is on vacation and has no backup admin.
Damn, not sure if this is a joke or speculation, but imagine the shit storm they’re gonna come back to. I kinda feel bad for them if they didn’t intend for this to happen and the cleanup they’ll have to do, but at the same time, they kinda shoulda made sure they had a backup, or at least closed sign-ups while they were gone (assuming it wasn’t a medical emergency).
They could be in the hospital or anything if there’s only one.
Definitely a nightmare to come back if that’s the case.
Brings back bad memories of so much work on Ark being undone by griefers…
Speculation, I have no idea what they can up be to
Somebody might be getting a nasty AWS bill at the end of the month.
Mmm weeks, delicious
Huh, don’t know what that was about. Edited.
Ok but it could be a raspberry pi chilling in someone’s house using utilities they already pay for anyway.
I imagine a lot of people have jobs where it would be trivial to set something like this up on company resources under the radar and then lose access / get laid off without the company ever knowing it’s running
This is pretty unlikely. Any competent IT department would notice an externally facing project.
I think its more likely that its on a vps or something and they just paid for like a year upfront.
No. It’s very likely. Not every company is run like a FAANG company with everything under a microscope. At your average company, it’s extremely common for individual teams to just have their own cloud service accounts for internal team use, not as tightly controlled as a company’s production cloud services account. I’d argue most of them are very loosely managed by a single person, letting said person do pretty much whatever they want.
And if those accounts have thousands of dollars in AWS credit or something, this could run under the radar for up to 6 months uninterrupted, depending on when the credits expire. Most credits are handed out for free from the cloud service provider with no cost auditing or anything of the like.
I’m in a position where I could do this myself at work with very low risk of getting caught. I just have no interest in doing so, and I’d rather not be fired if I did get caught. But it’s definitely possible.
Possible does not equate to likely. Its a pretty ridiculous scenario to assume when its much more reasonable to suspect that its just being hosted on a stable system and paid in advanced.
At mine, we get our own personal public dev sites which can host whatever code & software we like, alongside the products we develop and their APIs.
Totally possible to set up a lemmy instance and nobody would know, but not worth losing a job over at all if caught.
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That didn’t answer the question at all lol
I think they mean it’s just running on someone’s homelab. So there is no real monthly billing.
Edit: so the IP belongs to contabo.com hosting. They provide cheap vps instances with 4 cores, 8gb ram, 50gb nvme and 32tb of monthly traffic which is plenty to start hosting a Lemmy instance. Could be they paid for a year and went on holiday or something like that. Who knows
That’s… not how bills work. Someone has to pay for the electricity, internet traffic / connectivity, and rent / mortgage for the server to exist somewhere. That’s true whether it’s self-hosted in someone’s basement or in a data center somewhere.
You technically aren’t wrong.
But, in my case, I already had all of the capacity paid for regardless. I’d say, lemmy runs me around 20-30w of load total.
30w * 24 hours * 30 days = 21,600Wh / 1,000 = 21Kwh * 0.08c = 1.68$ per month.
In reality, the power load is quite a bit less, and my calculations don’t account for the solar panels on my roof.
Given, I have around 140-160T of total storage capacity, its not really worth putting a price on the small amount used by lemmy. My internet is paid regardless, and lemmy usage is typically pretty low (typically measured in Kb/s). So, not really worth putting a price here, as it averages less then 1% of my total connection.
If, I wanted to put a price tag on it, my labor to actually support and maintain it, would be where all of the money went to.
Contabo’s sign up page lets you pay for up to 12 months at a time, in advance. It’s quite possible they paid for a year, set it up, and then forgot about it or haven’t been able to administer it for other reasons.
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I’m still trying to understand what he means with the rent or mortgage thing… Of course there is a cost but he doesn’t seem to understand how something like that easily stays under the radar… you are not going to notice it when a certain bill goes up for the little bit it costs to self host or what impact it will have on your mortgage… There are things like data usage that will be easier and clearer indicators
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As if everyone running a home server has proper monitoring. You think running an instance is going to make a noticeable difference on your electric bill? Mortgage for the server?
I checked the IP and it’s hosted on contabo.com
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Yeah, could also have paid for a year upfront
It’s not necessarily super expensive for someone who wants to host an instance, whether it’s at home or via server providers. Hosting a GOOD and high-traffic instance might cost more but still any nerd with disposable income can do it if they want.