this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago
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This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.

However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.

You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

  • Owning user accounts
  • Exclusively host communities
  • Serving local and remote users webpages and media
  • Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

Because servers "own" the user accounts and communities it's not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

I guess it's a bit too late for a redesign now... Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.

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

While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There's the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.

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

I've made https://lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/ to help take off some of that load. New registrations are welcomed and it should be maintained for a very very long time 🎂

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

@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.

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

I don't know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm going to set up a general purpose instance tomorrow with the intention of handling a relatively large number of users. The main problem is choosing a domain!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I was also contemplating setting up a new instance for this. I have 100s of gigs of unused ram, CPUs on idle and a 10gbit connection looking for something to do. The only issue I couldn't figure out was the name. I own itjust.works was thinking of something clever subdomain to use with it. I'm glad I'm not the only one with this issue

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I did it! https://sh.itjust.works

Credits go to you for the naming

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

Lol awesomesauce. I just made an account, I'll use it as my main instance for a while. Let's hope we can survive reddit hug of death 2.0 in July!

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

@autisticaudioguy lol same, just signed up today.

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

Dude killer url, nice one! Question for all, I clicked their link and went there and it’s an instance, surely. I tried to comment on their post, but was required to sign in.. I’m already signed in over here, I gotta sign in there, too? Anyhow I tried to sign in with my lemmy.ml creds but that didn’t work. How can I interact with posts there?

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

This is a great one! Might use it

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

Keep it simple with lemmy.itjust.works.

If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.

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

can't wait for fedd.itjust.works to go online!

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

It's a week later, but I did get this done finally. I've set up https://lem.monster/ . Still doing some tweaking, but it's open.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Naming things is one of the two most difficult issues in IT, alongside cache validation and off-by-one errors.

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

I'm getting the following error reading this post: "item at index 2 does not exist"

Should I post this on stack overflow or some other Lemmy help community?

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

Which frontend are you using?

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

choosing the name for my instance was easy. programming related? programming.dev it is!

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

I use kbin too.

New to this feedverse or how you call it.

Why isn't there one login that can post on all platforms and I have to signup on each separately?

If there is, you're not making it obvious I guess.

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

@nutomic @ionhowto you dont have to sign up on multiple instances. if you want to comment a post on another instance, copy the url and paste in into the search field and then your current instance will fetch the post so you can comment on it.

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

What happens to the users of one instance when that instance is shut down or deleted? Searching for a url seems way too complicated. Can't one subscribe to a server or sub category on a server?

This I would really want it to work but it's much worse to me than forums even.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @[email protected]

could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
If so, would you mind setting a "goalpost" for the community to help lift the financial burden?

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

hehe just recovered my 3 year old account

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

lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.

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

Except (as far as I'm aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.

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

I hope it's not inappropriate to comment this here, but if anyone's looking for another space to join, I'm in the process of building Krab Borg. It would be lovely to have people to help fill it out and diversify the communities, as well as suggest what the local ones should look like as I have no idea.

I'm trying to balance not reinventing the wheel/duplicating existing communities 100 times but also still supporting the idea of decentralisation and creating some duplicates (though this isn't hard and fast, I'm open to feedback).

I've seeded it with some communities from other servers (including a bunch from lemmy.ml) to get things moving a bit as well.

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

is it possible to move an existing profile to a new server, like on Mastodon? or I need to create a new one and "start over"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Right now, there is no import/export. It's a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I've been following all the optimization work they've been doing on github, I don't know if they sleep). You'll have to start over atm, sorry.

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

Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?

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

You have to create a new account. But that's easy ;)

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

That's kind of wrong though, isn't it? What about stuff like GDPR data exports? Users should be able to export their data, then import it into another instance, effectively migrating instances.

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

You are free to learn to program and write a user import routine for lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

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

You can on Mastodon, you just export your data, delete your account, create new account on another instance and upload your data and it's like what you said!

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

I think lemmy will be bitten in the ass by not having considered clustering/horizontal scaling from the start. Federation alone as a scaling mechanism is only feasible for "nerds". But if the network wants to grow, we will need a few scale-able large hosted instances. And if their only choice is to scale vertically, there will be a hard limit (unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^).

Another downside of this design is: you can't run it with high availability. If there's only one process per instance, updating it will mean the whole instance is down. Sure, if all goes well this downtime is under a second. But if it doesn't go well or if a migration is needed, this might quickly become hours.

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

Indeed. If a big instance like lemmy.ml was to be shut down all the communities would be lost. This is simply not sustainable. Why would users put effort building a community if it could be gone at any time?

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

That however would be a different problem. A horizontally scaled instance would be able to cope with more users, but if it shuts down for monetary, personal, or whatever reason, it's still down.

Protecting a community from this is what the decentralized part is for. That is already in place.

(Although there is a middle ground where you could design the system in a way that one instance is mirrored and load-balanced across different hosters. That would actually also be quite interesting to have. But that's another layer of complexity on top.)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

@[email protected] It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

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

Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Here they list them:

https://join-lemmy.org/donate

EDIT: shoutout to the madlad who donated $1,000!

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