Fediverse

One of the great things about lemmy.world's insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there's now real world production systems providing that opportunity.

The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.

I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.

I think no.

I'm having the same issues with pages not loading as everybody else - but this is a critical moment for Lemmy. A site like this only works if it has a lot of users - the more signups the better.

I understand that new users can sign up for other instances, and still see and interact with lemmy.world content - but I think adding any barrier to entry at all will potentially discourage a huge number of new users. As a rule, new users have no idea how lemmy, federation, instances, etc work - and telling them they can't sign up and to consider another instance will probably end with a lot of them just giving up and sticking to reddit.

The server issues will pass, but stunting our growth at such a critical stage might not. It's bad enough that beehaw defederated at a time like this.

I'm in favor of simplifying the signup process with auto-assigning an instance. [Edit: For users coming from https://join-lemmy.org/]

For people who start using the fediverse or lemmy, the concept of federated instances is hard to understand. It also does not matter that much at this part of their journey. How about randomly assigning new users to instances which are open? This could also help with load balancing between instances.

The idea is to make entry as quick and easy as possible. Once users familiarized themselves with content and communities, they can reevaluate their 'decision' which instance they want to make their home. At this point, they have a better idea what this is all about.

Choosing an instance right from the start should still be possible, just not be the default mode. Make it a small link at the bottom 'advanced mode' or whatever, just don't scare or burden newcomers with unecessary complexity.

To answer the question directly: I think each instance can make that decision for themselves, and open or close registration accordingly. Both is fine.

I get the point, but that limits the users' right to select which community they want to join. I feel that is more important than preemptive decentralization of content. Hopefully there is a way to migrate communities from one instance to another. Should an instance get too large that would be a good feature to mitigate risk.

Making it difficult for people to abandon reddit and join lemmy at THIS stage would be a bad idea. I think it has to scale.

Eventually if it successfully catches on and becomes the popular option, maybe. But even then I think I’d prefer a (or several) round-robin type options for joining. I think the server names are too exposed in lemmy to be easily understood by the masses. Like I get it but I’m a 20 year dev. Not a person in my family understands.

Depends on server loads and scaling.

If the engineer(s) and admin(s) running things can handle the costs associated with growth then I think it should stay open. However at a certain point the load on the infrastructure, sysadmins, and cost make that untenable.

It’s not cheap to run this kind of stuff. I know that first hand because of my career running HPC clusters and running them in cloud environments.

I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what this must be costing and I’m really thankful that someone is putting in the thankless labor of love. That’s why I canceled my Reddit premium and started donating to this instance to help with that in some way. The only other way I could help is donating my time & experience. But I think they need money more than engineers lol

The TL;DR is that if we want to keep these things online we need to donate money (and/or time/labor).

I do think there should be a hard limit to the number of total users in an instance. Otherwise as you said the content will get centralised in a specific instance. But that limit should be much higher than what lemmy.world now has. Also closing new registration at this time would be detrimental to the overall ecosystem. This is just my personal opinion.

nope, that would make the experience way worse with federation not working well with communities. like for example I've made a community over on lemmy.world and it has a couple of members and a few posts in it, but I can't see it from any other lemmy instances I've tried (unless it doesn't work if you're not logged in). you can kinda make kbin see it but to make posts appear you have to search for them and if you search for them before you search for the community, they appear in a random magazine and then when the magazine for that community is created the posts that were put in random stay there and never return... so yeah...

Personally I registered in lemmy.world not knowing any better. I would migrate my account to another instance in a heartbeat if it was possible.

It makes sense to pause registrations if an instance is actively overloaded, but there’s no reason it can’t keep growing if more hardware is added and the performance issues are resolved.

Yes. Encourage people to use federation FFS.

I don't think it's necessarily worth it to close, as others have pointed out it's a great real-world stress test for the software.

I DO think it's very much worth having some info on the signup page to let people know

• they're welcome to join but the server is currently overloaded and experiencing performance issues

• they don't need to sign up there to access the content

and of course

• where to go instead

Then everyone is informed and can make up their own mind instead of blindly signing up and assuming this is just what Lemmy is like.

It’s already laggy and unstable. Maybe more hardware and improved software will help, but it might just be hard for lemmy to grow.

At the early stages no. It is vital we keep it open to get as many people through the door to promote fediverse. Eventually some people will create accounts in other instances.