Lemmy

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Is there 'etiquette' for choosing which instance your migrated subreddit is hosted on? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1028827

This question may be moot but it's something I've been thinking about. I've only recently jumped into this brave new world so you'll have to forgive my ignorance.

I'm wondering if there's any etiquette or conventions for which instance a 'migrated' subreddit should be hosted on. More specifically, I'm thinking about the communities where the subject matter is more regional.

For example, if I use an account on a UK-based instance because that's local to me then it might not be optimal to create a community on the UK instance if the subject matter is US-centric. Would that ultimately lead to a worse experience for the majority of those community members that are based in North America?

The difference in speed for me connecting to something in the UK vs the US is basically negligible, but it's non-zero and potentially exacerbated for those that have slower or unstable internet connections. This may be particularly true while rapidly-expanding instances are a bit unstable anyway.

It's obviously up to the mods of each subreddit to decide what to do for their "official" migration. However, what I'm afraid of happening is:

A migrated subreddit is hosted on an instance which has a detrimental effect on the experience of a significant number of its users.
To combat this, former Reddit communities get splintered into multiple, region-based communities.

The latter wouldn't be so bad but one of the things that made Reddit so appealing to me was the differences in perspective from all walks of life that sparked discussion. That sense of being part of a diverse, active community might be lost if the overall Reddit migration is handled in a haphazardly way.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Am I worrying about a non-issue?

~Is~ ~it~ ~time~ ~to~ ~crack~ ~each~ ~other's~ ~heads~ ~open~ ~and~ ~feast~ ~on~ ~the~ ~goo~ ~inside?~

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It seems like a non major issue. It’s better to start the communities you want to have, rather than wait on someone else who might be marginally better located.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm about as far from being an expert as there can be but as a programmer I would say that the main consideration would be load... if you were to migrate the contents, is it 50 posts or 50,000. If its just users moving in and starting a new empty community, they can spread themselves over many instances anyway. But you still have to think about how much they are posting and how frequently.

I am not aware whether there are metrics available by instance as to how much they "can support". Of course cloud hosted instances could expand infinitely, but are limited by the budget. If you anticipate a high load then perhaps talking to the instance owners of the larger ones would be appropriate.

On the flip side, the instance listing could include these metrics or instance owners could set a bio of what their capabilities are or what they can handle.

Another consideration would be what else they host... you don't want to find your instance defederated for trolls or other nastiness in other communities. That said, if its an nsfw sub, you probably should go to one of the nsfw instances.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks. The increased load of a major sub migrating and needing to work with the instance owner somehow isn't something I'd considered. It seems I did a whole of of thinking about this without really thinking about anything!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is very much in its infancy as a product. And I suspect they may have been ill prepared for the reddit influx.

So far it seems to have held up surprisingly well thanks to the federated architecture.

At this point any thought into the topic is good. Lemmy is going to rely on people who do the thinking, the coding and the hosting if its going to survive as a non commercial product.