Welcome!
Due the recent high amount of users coming over from Reddit, many of the existing large Lemmy instances have been struggling to keep up. This instance was created to help spread out the load on the Lemmy network. Lemmy newbies are welcome here.
The goal for lemm.ee is to provide a home Lemmy instance for anybody that needs one. That means that you are more than welcome here even if you mostly intend to just interact with other instances rather than this one!
Note: if you want to start up a new community here, but the name is already taken by an inactive community, then don't worry! Inactive communities can be transferred to new moderators. Please follow the steps outlined in our FAQ under the "How can I take over an inactive community" section.
What is Lemmy?
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator. This image explains it pretty well! In general, the fact that it's "federated" just means that it works much like e-mail - in the same way as a Gmail user can send e-mails to iCloud Mail users or Outlook users, a lemm.ee user is able to participate in communities on many different Lemmy instances. Regardless of which Lemmy instance your account lives on, you are a part of the federated network and can interact with other users from other instances, so this instance is as good of a place as any other to get started with Lemmy.
If you have any further questions about Lemmy, please check out our guide/FAQ!
About lemm.ee (this instance)
lemm.ee is intended to be a serious long-term instance, not just some random experiment.
You can always find the most up to date rules and general info about lemm.ee in the sidebar on our front page. If you want to know more about how this instance is run, you can check our administration and federation policy.
For some technical background, this instance is operated following industry best practices:
- Our infrastructure is robust and has been built up with redundancy and recoverability in mind
- The servers are running in the cloud (this is not some bedroom server situation!)
- All of the infrastructure is described declaratively as code, which allows relatively quick and safe changes to any part of our infrastructure whenever necessary
- Our entire database is backed up constantly, so in the worst case, we can always restore our data
A significant chunk of funding for this infrastructure comes directly from our amazing community. This support is essential to help secure our future. These supporters deserve the gratitude of all lemm.ee users!
You can read more details about how our instance is funded on this GitHub sponsorships page. There is also a Ko-Fi donations page as a back-up.
Thanks for the instance! What is this instance's stance on privacy? (for example, do you intend to keep logs indefinitely, and do you only keep the minimum data necessary to run the service)
Hey!
For all system logs, log retention is currently configured to be 14 days. Any logs older than that are automatically deleted. I don't have any plans to change this at the moment.
Yes! I am not collecting any data other than what the Lemmy software collects on its own. I am not planning on setting up any frontend analytics or telemetry on top of the Lemmy UI.
Thanks for the info!
Out of curiosity - how is sensitive data (emails, passwords) stored? Is it possible for an instance owner to introspect these things or are they completely hashed/obfuscated from access? New to the fediverse and want to make sure I understand it better :)
Passwords are hashed, it's not possible for any instance owner to inspect those.
As for e-mails, it's not technically possible to hide those from instance owners, because servers need to be able to read the e-mail addresses in order to actually send e-mails. So you should assume that your e-mail address is always visible to whoever runs the instance you're on - but this is true for any website you sign up on with your e-mail.