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.

  • Bilb!@lemmy.mlEnglish
    62·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • Ruud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    2 years ago

    Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You’re welcome there.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
    49·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • aksdb@feddit.deEnglish
    47·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      2 years ago

      I think you probably underestimate how far one can get with “vertical” scaling. Here’s the dockerfile: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/release/v0.17/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml

      • It includes 4 different containers… so there’s a way to scale out to 4 machines right away. Maybe not every container is doing an equal amount of work… but there’s some amount of immediately available machine-splitting.
      • I’m no expert, but I believe that at least the lemmy and lemmy-ui containers are stateless. If so, they’re horizontally scalable already.
      • Postgres then would likely be the main bottleneck. But postgres offers read-replicas, so again the write-load and the read-load can be hosted on separate machines. And if there’s enough read-load, you can have many replicas.

      Other comments from the admins have shown that lemmy.ml today is running on a single eight-core box and it’s currently hosting 30k registered users and over 1k active. So how much more compute capacity can we throw at “vertical” scaling on the current software architecture?

      • Just by going to a bigger single box, we can get 128 cores with no problem, a 16x bump in capacity. Does that get us to at least to 300k registered + 10k active?
      • Splitting the containers onto 4 separate machines. Does that get us 2x more?
      • Adding PG read-replicas and additional lemmy/lemm-ui containers would allow us to expand our instance footprint to maybe 6 physical machines should get us another 2x or more in performance.

      Conservatively, that’s 100x the computing capacity of the current hardware and could potentially support 1m registered users and 50k active. Now, I don’t REALLY expect this to be possible today, there will be many software bottlenecks found along the way to scaling a single instance this large. But my point is that there’s already a medium amount of horizontal scalability built into lemmy, and if the software doesn’t fall over for algorithmic reasons (which is will at first), the current infrastructure architecture allows quite a lot of growth. There’s plenty of time between now and a federation of million user instances to adopt a truly distributed storage backend if needed.

    • federico3@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      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?

  • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    47·
    2 years ago

    @nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.

    • Provoked Gamer@lemmy.caEnglish
      16·
      2 years ago

      I agree because this way, new users will learn what and how to use other instances. Plus, it also helps with finding more content, especially if the user picked an instance without many people which makes there be less communities and content they can check out on first glance.

      • Red Army Dog Cooper@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        I disagree because it makes the more narrowly focused topic or theme based instances more daluted, makes everything blur together more, I also see it as a detrament to the smaller intances because they will now there local comunity will have less traffic

            • gkd@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              I think a client that might select a server for you by default (hopefully a trusted one of course) would make things way more easy to understand for the average user. Then making it easier to add or view communities on other instances.

  • lightrush@lemmy.caEnglish
    44·
    2 years ago

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

  • Antman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    42·
    2 years ago

    I have been wondering how cumbersome the Lemmy design will become for some. I love the idea that it is federated and decentralized however these are also major drawbacks for most average users (i.e not multi account users.

    Multiple accounts needed for maximum uptime on different instances. What if I really like my username and its taken on another instance? If one instance is down and i comment with my other account will i then need to manage replies etc through different profiles? What happens if something spins up another instance of a similar domain so that they can get a username of someone to imitate them? I am sure these can be blocked after the fact or will other federated instances be automatically blocked.

    What happens when someone gets bored of their instance and stops it, or it gets blocked, or they start getting unwanted attention. Does this mean all that content then goes into the ether?

    Will this go down the route of whomever provides the instance with the most resources, best load balancing becoming the one, blocking other instances and controlling it as if it were private and independent?

    There are a lot wait and see things, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.

    • Undearius@lemmy.caEnglish
      22·
      2 years ago

      I’ve experienced a taste of this already. I checked the instance list a couple days ago, and didn’t see one that stood out for my interests, so I created an account on the main lemmy.ml instance.

      I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

      ------

      Another “issue” (a bug or feature?) I’m seeing is there are a lot of duplicate communities between the instances. I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community.

      • 0xc0ba17@lemmy.mlEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community

        Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like “gaming”), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.

      • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        2 years ago

        I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

        I believe what you did was necessary. There’s a bug for account export and transfer to another instance, but it’s still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506. It doesn’t appear that Lemmy has an account migration feature like Mastodon does, and consequently you’ve got to migrate your settings manually and then leave some kind of post or link in your old profile to where the new profile is.

        • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          8·
          2 years ago

          But I understand that it’s possible, since it’s possible on Mastodon, right? IMO a smooth account migration process where you don’t lose anything on the account even if the server randomly shuts down, and it’s just another line in your account history solves a lot of the problems I see with Lemmy.

          Even for registration, it would lower the criticality of instance choice so you have more solutions like using a buffer server that gives people X time to choose another server, randomizing or even just to lower the pressure of it.

          • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
            8·
            2 years ago

            Yes, it is possible, but was not a priority until now. The boom of users is basically just two days old, the devs have not gotten enough time to catch up yet hehe

            • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              For sure for sure, can’t be easy keeping up with the sudden influx as it is, let alone launching new features.

              • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                I’m not a dev, no. But I’ve been here a while and like to help out :)

          • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            I’m no expert, but the dev commentary on that ticket suggests that it can be done but hasn’t risen up their priority list… and yeah… Mastodon accomplishing this with ActivityPub which Lemmy also uses suggests it’s possible. I agree it would be valuable, and opens up options when instances churn or get over/under populated.

      • JshKlsn@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        That’s me right now.

        Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn’t have communities I want.

        • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          11·
          2 years ago

          You didn’t need to switch. You could’ve followed the same communities on lemmy.ml straight from your Beehaw account. It’s one of the benefits of federation.

          • GuyDudeman@lemmy.mlEnglish
            6·
            2 years ago

            That needs to be made more clear, in my opinion.

            Also, how does a ban work in that case?

            If you’re signed into an account on Instance A and subscribed to a community on Instance B, and the Instance B admins ban you… Couldn’t you just sign up for a new account on Instance B or Instance C and rejoin/participate in the Instance B community again?

            Also, if the Instance A admins ban your Instance A account from their entire instance, couldn’t you just login to your Instance B account and join all of Instance A’s communities?

            For instance, if LemmyGrad banned my LemmyGrad account for being a “lib”… couldn’t I just use my Beehaw or Lemmy.ml account to participate in the LemmyGrad communities? Would this force them to detect/ban me twice?

            Seems like admins/mods of Lemmy instances and communities are going to have to be doing a multitude more work than the Reddit admins/mods.

            And they’ll have to also be detectives, to suss-out whether or not a user is someone who has previously been banned from their community.

            Once this gets going with bots and whatnot, the federated system seems to be a bit of a spaghetti nightmare.

        • dan1101@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I went for beehaw first too, couldn’t get registration to respond but then saw they didn’t offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.

          • Lobstronomosity@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            Downvoting is just used as a disagree button, not for its original purpose of promoting discourse and hiding comments that don’t add to the conversation.

            Any comments that add to the conversation get upvotes. Any that don’t, can be reported and removed. I prefer it that way.

    • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      16·
      2 years ago

      These are some issues I’ve been thinking about as well.

      What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance? Maybe there should be a distributed user index amongst instances to prevent duplicate usernames?

      I think making the federalized infrastructure incumbent upon users to understand and select is not something the average user is going to bother with. This is complicated problem, I don’t know the answer might be off the top of my head.

      And what happens when an instance goes down? Does every user and their history get torched? Is there a migration process or at least a decommissioning policy in place?

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        Trolls impersonating the Lemmy developers has happened in the past. best is to report this to the instance admins who can delete the accounts as from the post history it is usually clear who the imposter is. Not sure if there can be a better way to handle this, probably not?

        • Lobstronomosity@lemmy.mlEnglish
          5·
          2 years ago

          As @RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml says, create a distributed index of usernames, and do not allow the same username to be registered twice.

          I’d also propose at the same time to create a Discord style username system to avoid potential clashes - if this system is going to become large (mainstream) then eventually available usernames will be hard to choose from.

        • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          There can be a manual process for anything, but could be a major issue if lemmy receives a big influx of “redfugees” in the coming weeks.

          Like I said, something like a distributed user index across instances could address this.

          • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            Then people would start name-squatting and you would end up with people having to resort to tom123@lemmy.ml just because someone on a totally different instance already registered tom@example.com. The instance already signifies that it is a different user and it is rather the exception that someone intentionally tries to impersonate a user by copying the avatar etc.

            • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.mlEnglish
              3·
              2 years ago

              How is that ultimately any different from how usernames work in a centralized system? If you have a username on reddit, that’s your username no matter what the subreddit/community. I understand how lemmy is analogous to email, but I’m not sure it’s the right model for a link aggregator and discussion system.

              I guess what I’m saying is that decentralization may be better served if instances operated as an internal load balancing system rather than strictly separate servers. This would also help with an influx of new users, so you can just spin up a new instance and lemmy just flexes up without having to manually direct users to sign up on a specific server/instance.

      • 0xc0ba17@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance?

        Mastodon can have (has?) the same problem. This is somewhat solved with the self-verification process though, so it could be done similarly on Lemmy.

    • naoseiquemsou@lemmy.mlEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      You made some good points. We often forget that most people have trouble with simple technical concepts, and the mere fact of having no simple and straightforward answer to “where do I register?” Is something that can inibit a lot of users.

      This happens so much in the open source world. Things that are obvious to us can be difficult to others, but open systems aren’t designed for the general public.

  • Copio@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    2 years ago

    Over at https://join-lemmy.org/ , when someone clicked on “Join a Server”, they are presented with a list of instances, it’s not that obvious that these are cross-accessible (yes, the homepage mentioned it, but not here), and people are bound to look for one with the most users.

    Perhaps, add a simple TLI5 explanation/diagram explaining how Lemmy works on https://join-lemmy.org/instances .

    (The documents are also too wordy for most people to care.)

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
    38·
    2 years ago

    Another thing:

    We do need more site admins to help us handle the applications and moderation.

    For obvious reasons, we prefer ppl who have been here for a long time, and post / comment consistently. If you’d like to help us out, so that nutomic and I can focus on coding, that would be splendid.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      I’d raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it’s probably not a good idea :)

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        We’d love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.

    • ඞmir@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      I can handle some applications daily, and I’m also planning to grow some more niche communities :)

    • whiny9130@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      I mean I’d love to help - either modding someone’s server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)

  • LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.mlEnglish
    36·
    2 years ago

    I tried like 4 or 5 instances before coming to lemmy.ml, but none of them were taking applications anymore. Finding even those was a hassle, since all I got was a list of domains without any details as to what the instance is about or if they allowed newcomers.

    Now that I’ve setup everything, Lemmy does seem like nice alternative to Reddit, but as someone from the outside, all of this is daunting.

  • UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    32·
    2 years ago

    I sent my registration yesterday, because I signed in another instance, one from my country, but I couldn’t see all the post and no comments from lemmy.ml even thought is supposedly linked, so thank you for approving my account.

    Even if I’m a tech savvy person I found the whole experience of joining lemmy pretty bad, I like the concept of federation, but I think it’s too confusing to normal people, it really needs to be more seamless if you want to grow, how? idk, I was thinking some sort of replication, when you sign up, you are registered to the main instance (this) and given the choice to select other instances, automatically selecting let’s say another 3 based on your location, then your account is synced in all the registered and linked instances, when you login if an instance is experiencing overload then it switches to another one. I don’t know if this is realistic or out of the scope of Lemmy, or maybe against the philosophy of it. I’m just rambling.

    I’m just glad that there is an open alternative for anonymous social interaction in this day of walled internet services such as discord, twitter, facebook etc. and I wish you all the success.

    • Deiv@lemmy.mlEnglish
      24·
      2 years ago

      Agreed, someone needs to create an easy “sign up here” with a default option (maybe just randomize across various instances, not sure)

      • Kamirose@beehaw.orgEnglish
        14·
        2 years ago

        Randomizing would cause lots of issues since each instance has different rules and philosophies. It’s a difficult problem to solve.

    • Packopus@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      2 years ago

      I found it rather easy to get signed up, just had to wait for the admin to actually approve the application. Otherwise it was pretty easy.

      However, I do see a HUGE benefit to “load balancing” as you are mentioning. Where you sign up for a master server and then replicated to the others that are more applicable. I’m surprised this isn’t already a process as this is very common in gaming and proxied sites.

      • UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.mlEnglish
        15·
        2 years ago

        Yeah the registration itself was easy like any other site, I was talking more about grasping and understanding the concept of instances and how they interact.

        And as someone said in another comment, the see all posts options should be the default in your home and community search or you feel like in a dessert island when you are new to all of this.

        • drmodmin@satl.inkEnglish
          8·
          2 years ago

          Both Mastodon and Lemmy have this problem. Make the default where the most new content is, which is going to be the federated tab and all tabs respectively.

    • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Yeah, federated logins of some sort would be really nice to have. There have been some mentions of integrating something from Streams onto Lemmy.

  • Generator@lemmy.pt
    English
    32·
    2 years ago

    If now is struggling then on June 12 will be a nightmare.
    Reddit will go dark in protest, many messages to join Lemmy, most instances will be overloaded or even DDoS with so many users, like what happen with Mastodon.

      • Generator@lemmy.pt
        11·
        2 years ago

        Not only fediverse, back in the day when reddit was cool servers outages was a daily thing

        • JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
          3·
          2 years ago

          Wasn’t even that long ago. I’d say only the past 3 or so years has Reddit stopped showing me the “oOps U BwoKe WokEy WedDit” screen on a regular basis. Up until then, I’d get that screen a good 20+ times per day.

      • FaceDeer@lemmy.mlEnglish
        20·
        2 years ago

        Seems like this should be a high priority feature. I did try joining a different instance but at the time only lemmy.ml was functioning and accepting applications. Now that I have subscribed to a bunch of communities starting afresh would be a bit of a hassle.

          • FaceDeer@lemmy.mlEnglish
            14·
            2 years ago

            Well that’s not a good sign. I hope the potential flood of users brings a flood of devs along with it.

            • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
              19·
              2 years ago

              It will for sure. Lemmy has seen such a massive influx of new users in just two days. It has barely given any time for the devs and admins to catch up. Stuff takes time to implement, but fortunately, now there have been donations and more people helping out!

        • Nyanix@beehaw.orgEnglish
          4·
          2 years ago

          I think that’s been one of the winning features of Mastodon that Lemmy could heavily benefit by implementing, this is a great callout

  • darkkite@lemmy.mlEnglish
    25·
    2 years ago

    I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.

  • Barbarian@lemmy.mlEnglish
    25·
    2 years ago

    Users are likely going to see this as it’s the “official” Lemmy instance when trying to join for the first time.

    Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!