Wow there’s a Ponza deck in Pauper? I don’t really follow the format but I love that and I love the diversity.

Here’s the top 8 after I became curious: https://www.pauperwave.com/top-8-paupergeddon-pisa-2024/

and 9-32: https://www.pauperwave.com/top-16-top-32-paupergeddon-pisa-2024/

Yeah this video format is awesome, the cuts to the players for a breakdown of their decisions/plays is super helpful.

Yes I agree with all of this, most of mine see very little traffic as well. I have personal Pixelfed/Mastodon instances that are basically me talking to myself and even at their lowest tiers I just can’t justify the price anymore sadly. $14/mo for just the Mastodon droplet and backups (Rails needs at least 2GB of RAM to compile assets!) just isn’t sustainable. Moving was a huge pain and I stayed with DO for the same reason you said (and I think that’s totally fine), but I finally broke recently when I could cut the price to 1/3 at Hetzner.

Big +1 on DO’s docs/guides too, I’ve used their guides on nginx, certbot, and many others quite a bit and they’re very well maintained.

I’ve variously come across NearlyFreeSpeech before and for tiny static sites that seems like a great deal. I actually may even prefer the grumpy sysadmins at this phase 😜

Not at all, I’ve been using Digital Ocean for years and still do for some sites. Their admin panel is fantastic and they have a lot of really convenient features (one of my favorites that I miss is their CDN, Spaces, and how seamlessly it handles SSL). I recommend them still for ease of use, but have been moving away for 2 reasons:

• Cost. Their prices are increasing, in a world where hardware costs are otherwise going down, and that’s on top of already high-ish prices. DO is good but if I wanted to pay I’d at least want to get the reliability and ecosystem of AWS etc. $6-7/mo for a 1 vCPU/1GB ram VPS is too much for a “tier 2” provider and you’ll easily need to move to $12-14/mo for what I think should be base (1 vCPU/2GB ram).

  Comparatively, Hetzner’s base US config is $5/mo for 2 vCPU/2GB, already better than DO’s upgrade. Their next level is like $9/mo for 3 vCPU/4GB ram and the differences become exponential the higher you go. The value is fantastic and there are cheaper deals if you don’t mind an EU datacenter.

• IP credibility. I didn’t realize this beforehand but I’ve been running my own email server on DO for 4 years and their IP credibility is sadly not good. Worse than competitors, and I’ve had a lot of issues getting caught in spam filters and working with providers to re-whitelist my IP. This is with DMARC/etc all setup properly. Apparently their IP blocks have been used by bad actors a lot and we pay that price.

Hetzner has been really good so far and their admin panel is solid, not as easy and feature-rich as DO’s but still very good. Their value and reliability has been great so far IME and I’ve moved my other federated services there.

FWIW I’m also using Backblaze B2 and would recommend them too.

Happy to answer any specific questions too!

Thanks @calvinball!

Quick update: spam users have just been purged and the site stats have been updated (note in the homepage sidebar that the user count is now correct).

Next up we’ll be running some queries to remove all the redundant data associated with those spam accounts but this won’t affect the site at all.

I believe the Lemmy default is to allow federation anywhere, which is how it is here (no blocklists or allowlists).

Currently if you subscribe to non-MTG communities hosted elsewhere using your @mtgzone.com account, you’d see those subscriptions on your homepage here at mtgzone.com.

I’ve been thinking about this since we set it up over the weekend and I think that’s expected behavior and the most likely to help this grow. Users should be free to use their account to follow whatever they’re interested in, and while we host MTG-related content in our communities and will not expand the server outside of Magic content, that shouldn’t restrict users from using their account to follow what they want hosted elsewhere (and viewable in their account here).

The alternatives are:

1. For everyone to maintain multiple accounts (hisale@mtgzone.com for mtg content, hsiale@lemmy.ml for other stuff, etc). This seems untenable.

2. Not allow anyone to signup here for an account and require registration at other instances. This too seems counterintuitive and user-hostile.

Great point on beginner questions and setting up a general FAQ, I’ll try to draft something up with a bit of a angle towards people here and sticky it.