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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I would be happy to use another instance but my account is on this one. Is there a way to migrate an account, or perhaps “link” accounts on multiple instances somehow?
AFAICT no. There is an open issue on the Lemmy GitHub repo. In general, all ActivityPub services I’ve used have this same account stratification problem.
I would appreciate this as well. Besides the flood of users issue, this server’s theme (Marxist-Leninist) doesn’t mesh with my politics. I created my account in the early days of Lemmy, so I have an extensive history that I am loath to sacrifice.
Wait isn’t lemmy.ml a general purpose server?
It is, but unlike elsewhere, ML folks are usually not banned or defederated here, only if they break rules (like insulting other users).
I think this is key. Have the possibility to move an account to another instance or have it spread out somehow. This would also secure the account in case an instance dies for some reason.
@radarsat1 @nutomic I’m still working this out myself, but you can browse Lemmy on any account, and then comment from your mastodon account by searching the commenter (@radarsat1 in the search field did it for me), and then replying to them on mastodon. Pretty cool how it’s linked, plenty of opportunities to build apps that make interacting between servers easier.
IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that’s going to create performance problems.
We’ll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.
There’s a website I highly recommend called fediverse observer, it doesn’t really go based on interest, but it has some other factors it uses and I really like it.
No problem just make a pull request with your changes.
You probably don’t want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)
That said, I dig what y’all are doing, and I’m veteran experience / interaction designer who’s been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.
I’m more of a backender myself, but I think some UX mockup would go a long way in getting this improved.
Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml
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?I think they said they’re at the highest tier of their provider. May need to migrate to a different provider and get a beefier setup.
Do Lemmy instances not scale horizontally?
They do, but I’m not sure how well, I’m not a dev, and have no programming knowledge, so looking at the documentation looks like arcane hieroglyphs.
I’m pretty sure I read a comment about it from one of the devs, but can’t recall the fine details of the conversation.
In theory, they can. But it depends on how it’s deployed.
From my cursory look at the deployment docs, Lemmy’s default deployment option is via docker. It relies on a postgreSQL server, which may or may not scale horizontally depending on the admin’s choice of implementation. For example, a deployment on AWS using Aurora would theoretically utilize auto-scaling.
I haven’t personally deployed an instance so, grain of salt.
EDIT: A good discussion about DB scaling here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3005
https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉
You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on
lemmy.mlsimilarly to howmastodon.socialdid it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.
Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative…
I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.
That’s how I wound up here too.
I’ll be honest. I only applied for this one but that was because I had (still have) no idea what I’m doing lol
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.
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.
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 🎂
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!
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.
Naming things is one of the two most difficult issues in IT, alongside cache validation and off-by-one errors.
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?
Which frontend are you using?
There are only two hard things in CS: naming things, caching, and off-by-one errors.
I already said that
Look at that, you sure did. I missed the “two hard things”. Wasn’t even drunk. 🤷
choosing the name for my instance was easy. programming related? programming.dev it is!
I name everything as var1 var2 etc.
var37.social incoming
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
sh.itjust.works
I did it! https://sh.itjust.works
Credits go to you for the naming
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?
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!
@autisticaudioguy lol same, just signed up today.
This is a great one! Might use it
can’t wait for fedd.itjust.works to go online!
Keep it simple with
lemmy.itjust.works.If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.
Do you also have a few million dollars under your mattress? 😁
I’d like to tell myself that if it got to the point where it started to cost a few million that i would be able to have it pay for itself!
Come join us at thebestinstance.com fam!
@nutomic@lemmy.ml what kind of hosting do you guys use for lemmy.ml? At the time of writing it looks like you have around 33k users and around 2k active. What does that look like for resources consumed?
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.
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.
Fediverse is the reverse of that - you sign up at one instance, and everyone can follow you from wherever they are. So you post in one place, get seen from everywhere else.
New user,how do I donate / tip to help you peeps cover server costs? It wasn’t directly obvious how to do it; apologize if it’s a big button right on a page that I missed.
Here. Liberapay is preferred.
Done my bit, started with a 5 dollar donation, monthly!
For future reference, the heart button up top is for funding.
something like lemmy-in.[tld] ?
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.
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.
This is really the only way distributed has a chance to work but you won’t have much power as a server owner to ban users and be an edge Lord. Maybe the next things that comes up will be a true distributed network that also has incentives for people to spin-up new instances when needed.
