So if we’re talking lemmy.radio or !amateur_radio@lemmy.radio, I can try to speak to that or give my thought’s on how things have been. (I guess we are talking lemmy.radio: OPs comment).

lemmy.radio

So we’ve been here just over a year! (YAY!). Of course, this instance was started like most instances because of the API policy that Reddit put in place around June/July of last year. Lemmy itself EXPLODED. I thought it’d be fun to start one specifically for amateur radio communities and people. The first month was crazy and it was almost hard to keep up on the number of people wanting to join. And just so people know, we have a VERY simple question I need answered when you join our instance: “What are your interests in amateur radio?” This very, VERY simple question weeded out a lot of new comers, and that was a decision I made early on. I wanted this place to be ONLY for people who are interested in amateur radio.

My criteria for answering that question isn’t strict. I’m sorta making up the numbers off the cuff but I’d say 60% of people respond with something that is a part of amateur radio (radios, contesting, digital modes, etc…), 25% try to join because because they like music radio, and the last 15% just give no answer. I ONLY LET IN THE 60%. And while there’s no way for me to get a real answer to this: about 15-20 of our 267 users are “active” weekly, and I’d call maybe 3-4 of them “power users”. This doesn’t account for people who just use our instance to browse their subscribed communities.

A few months after this instance was up, things of course slowed down. Moving to a new service is hard. On average, I have maybe 3-4 people asking to join our instance a month now. We’ve had a few big sign up times that mostly correspond to other fediverse events, or more recently, Reddit saying they may allow charging for use of certain communities.

To get to the question: I like our slow growth. I like keeping this instance for us hams. In my opinion, it gives us a place to take care of and even police, because that’s also a big part of amateur radio, and I greatly appreciate all of you for helping with that.

In the future, we may see larger growth. We’ve only had 1 major outage and that was due to storage limits. It’s just an issue with lemmy in general and I’m trying to see if the newest updates can help us with that so this doesn’t become a money sink.

So the answer for a DRASTIC GROWTH on our instance? It’s only as big as I let it get for now because we are NOT an open instance and we have an entrance “exam”.

amateur_radio@lemmy.radio

This is the big one for me. Not sure if anyone remembers, but this community started out as !ragchew@lemmy.radio, but it turns out, no one outside of our instance knew what that meant and NO ONE used it. So I turned it into amateur_radio, and we took off. And not to brag (maybe a little), we were up against a LOT of big instances who also had an amateur_radio community and now, we’re basically the de facto community… which gets me to @vk6flab@lemmy.radio question: what happens if our awesome ham radio community explodes with usage, bad actors, or just spam?

For the most part, it’s just been moderation, and that’s just been me so far. I DO have some numbers on this, and you can check Modlogs to check this. Over the past year, I’ve modded/deleted 12 posts that were just straight up spam, hate speech, or something that just didn’t belong (people really, really think this place is about music radio). As for user moderation: 5 people have been moderated, the breakdown being:

• 3 were “timed out” meaning can’t post for a week to a month. (2 of them harassed me like crazy on mastadon)
• 1 was permanently banned for harassing people and saying very not cool things in comments on other instances
• 1 was just given a talking to about site spamming, but I knew their heart was in the right place

And those are important numbers! 99.99% of posts on our instance go to amateur_radio. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I mean it makes sense. Sometimes I wish our smaller baby communities got some love, but that’s not how lemmy works really, especially when amateur_radio is a blanket term for all the other communities. So I DO focus on this community more than others, and it seems, so do you.

I can definitely see a time when I’ll add other moderators to this community, if anything because I see that a lot of you are taking care of it and monitoring it already. For now, I hope you think things seem copacetic. If you see the opposite, please let me know! As lemmy itself grows, that also means that amateur_radio will grow. So I would say that if we do see a DRASTIC SUDDEN growth, we up the moderators and have a frank talk about what this community is (and I hope this loooong comment speaks to what I want this community to be).

I’m also always up for hearing other ideas in case that happens, especially if you have experience in something like this. Knowing how lemmy is, I wouldn’t see that being a huge issue in the near future (famous last words), but I like what we’ve built and I want to make sure this community is a place we all enjoying sharing and posting in.

73,

Ben w0odl