Just wanted to say thanks

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to take a second and thank all of you who use the site.

A little history of the site:

The VPS this site runs on was originally created so I could do the Linux Upskill Challenge years ago as I was just starting to get into Linux and FOSS at the time. Not too long after that I discovered Lemmy which was in its infancy. I joined lemmy.ml and after a year or so decided the software was mature enough that I felt like I could take a stab at starting my own instance. There were still only maybe 100 or so users on the few lemmy instances out there. I wanted a region-themed instance and eventually decided on midwest.social as the domain. I actually had another server for Ohio (where I live) but it wasn't used a ton and I didn't like paying for 2 VPS's so I shut that one down after a while.

Eventually, reddit went public and made a bunch of their users mad and lots of people started jumping ship to Lemmy, and that's when my userbase (as well as other servers' userbases) increased drastically. I remember suddenly one day I just started getting email, after email, after email of people applying to join the site.

Nowadays, the stats say there are around 2.5k users on midwest.social. I'm not sure how many of those are active but it's still kinda nuts for me. I think the thing I'm most shocked about is just how nice almost everyone is that has joined. Even when there are technical issues they're not ripping my head off.

It's a unique experience to see so many people using a website you started in your spare time. I never get tired of it, although I do tend to forget there are more of you than I realize lol. Some days I'm like, "there's gotta be only like 15 people using my site" only to be reminded that it's definitely larger than that.

Anyways, thank you to everyone who uses the site and thank you to all who donate as well!