Thanks for the reminder, just made a small donation. I agree this instance is great! I first made an account on lemmy.world then made this one with the intention of keeping it for UK and more niche interest stuff, so it doesn't get lost in a sea of memes. But I might just make this my main account instead.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Feddit UK
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Community for the Feddit UK instance.
A place to log issues, and for the admins to communicate with everyone.
founded 1 year ago
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The fact that lemmy.world is the size of the rest of the large Lemmy instances combined can be useful if you are starting a community because there are a lot of local users who will just spot your community from "Local" and you can get thousands of more followers. It's also run by a well-known and well-founded non-profit so they have the knowhow and finance to pretty much guarantee that they are going to stick around.
However, as people have found, it can slow down. As they run mastodon.world and calckey.world and Reddit and Twitter both threw spanners in their own works last weekend they were likely scrambling to boost capacity and it showed the strain. There are also concerns about everything being centralised in just a few big instances on each service. I don't see a way the .world instances could be taken over by commercial interests so I think we're alright from that front but we can't predict the future.
I was reading that Lemmy.World has to restart its Lemmy instance every 30 minutes, else it runs out of RAM and falls on it's arse.... And a single instance won't use all the CPU threads correctly, so that have to run a few on the same server and load-balance them.
Let's hope those bugs can get ironed out!
Oh wow that would certainly be a pain.
They applied some database fixes on the 5th that have much improved the speed now.
My worry is about how this scales. It's fast for now, but as we get more users it'll slow down, and the costs will increase as the infra needs to scale up. There will be a point where Tom decides he doesn't want to support it anymore or can't.
I'd be quite interested to know the monthly costs for running the instance and what's involved.
True, but it's up to Tom if he wishes to be transparent about costs and/or donations received or not.
As I used to run a large server for a large community forum a few years ago - admin'ing something like this can sometimes be a very thankless task, and users will be sympathetic if you're out of pocket (and only some will help) but as soon as they see you made a tiny bit of profit one month, they forget the fact that actually, you're about ยฃ1k down at the moment, as this extra ยฃ62.32 I've made this mornth can go against that... ;-) Not to mention the free time given up to actually maintain and look after a busy server. So I'd totally understand if he didn't want others telling him what he might be doing wrong with his costs, etc. "Oh, well, you could save ยฃ4.20 if you moved the whole service to this little unknown company ... etc." :)
I'm also hoping as the code for Lemmy matures, it becomes less memory-hungry and more CPU-friendly. The more help they get on Github to make it truly scalable, the better.
Time will tell! I'm just thankful for what we have now.
I'm not overly worried. There are plenty of Mastodon servers out there that have been running happily for years on donations. The running costs, while I'm sure aren't insignificant, are also nowhere near what it takes for somewhere like Reddit.
The good thing with the Fediverse is that the more users it attracts, the more servers spring up to accomodate. That's kind of the whole point, to balance the load between servers rather than have everyone on the same one.
The nature of it being a UK orientated instance will hopefully help to limit the appeal to manageable amount.
Fediverse can be incredibly useful, especially when it has the financial support it needs to thrive. With the right backing, this platform can truly offer a unique and valuable experience for users.
I initially made a world account but it's very slow and fails a lot so I'll probably just hang out here instead