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!
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.
That's cool. Does it have the ability to post notifications, like an explanation of why there's downtime or ETA for restoration?