I was researching joining diaspora and found your lemmy instance through https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/ . I was trying to find a diaspora pod that federates with lemmy and found your lemmy instance by mistake.
It’s cool to see some of the fediverse being hosted in the greater StL area! Are you interested in having local users join or primarily doing this to self-host and not be beholden to others? If you do want local (STL) users I am in the process of trying to get friends off of FB, Reddit, Instagram, etc and onto FOSS/fediverse and this could be a good place to direct them.
Yo! Admin of the instance here. To directly answer the subject question: O’Fallon-ish area… within STC county.
Mostly I’m hosting this instance to support decentralization, increase the fediverse’s capacity, and yeah to not be beholden to others. I do have open registration turned on and welcome anyone that cares to sign up. If this instance starts getting some use then I promise I won’t rug-pull it out from anyone without adequate notice. Not that I had any thoughts about turning it off anyway.
As far as uptime and durability go, this is running on a three node physical kubernetes cluster in my basement backed by a ZFS NAS and all plugged into a UPS so we’re not in five-nines territory but it does pretty well.