Asklemmy

I've already put in the self hosting effort and honestly I think for anyone who knows what that means, the setup process is much easier than getting moderation right.

However, I have seen several posts about people worried that their accounts might disappear when the server disappears. I think there's a market for Lenny as a Service/Kbin as a Service. You'd need to market it as something like "your social network under your control" or whatever because "instance" means very little to most people.

Setting up your LaaS/Kaas business may be tricky, though, because you need to figure out how much people are willing to pay (which isn't much) while also being prepared for sudden scaling challenges when Reddit sheds users again. Luckily Lemmy seems to be very efficient with its resources so you can probably host five or ten instances on a cheap server without trouble (especially if you share the database).

It's very common to have admin teams where different admins have different areas of focus, and in particular to have folks that specialize in community management and different folks that specialize in infra management. I do think it's common for people to have to pitch in outside their area of expertise in busy times, but generally this structure works and is widely used.

The trick is finder such a partner where you both trust each other. In addition to this post, a couple other ways of finding a partner admin might be:

• Ask good mods in the communities you participate in if they'd like to run an instance together where you each contribute your strengths (their community management and your technical acumen).
• Scan Lemmy support communities for new instance admins who are struggling with a technical question. Help them out with their question, and ask if they are open to adding a systems specialist to their admin team to help their instance weather user growth.

I'd be picky about your partner, though, and thoughtful about how fast you scale up. It's much easier to scale infrastructure than to scale community management, and very easy to misjudge your willingness and ability to manage a large community if you haven't done so before. It would be easy to find yourself with a big instance and no community manager if someone gets in over their head and bails due to lack of experience and lack of understanding about how hard and thankless it is to admin a big instance.

But if you ask around enough I'm sure you'll find someone that would welcome engineering assistance.