Whether you are a Reddit refugee (I am one) or just randomly stumbled upon Lemmy and decided to join lemmy.world, welcome to the Fediverse.
If you have been here for long enough and settled in and now finally feel comfortable with Lemmy, I highly advice you to move to smaller instances. I just newly left Lemmy.world to join Lemm.ee.
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance. This will benefit the admins of Lemmy.world a lot as they would not have to deal with such a high amount of users. It also leaves room for new users to join and have a good experience rather than an experience filled with server outages where they will give up on Lemmy.
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Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.
Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.
Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.
It would still be better to have multiple “large” servers, instead of only one or two, which is currently the case. I really don’t think that it is a good thing to have a big difference between the biggest and the next biggest servers, as it effectively centralizes the content around the biggest instance.
I however agree that it doesn’t make sense to have tons of tiny instances.
I keep saying that the US needs to have its own big instance (or several) to host all those communities about US cities and sports teams that nobody else needs to care about, as well as potentially a good chunk of users and to exist as a large server alternative to lw.
People who see it this way are likely not from the US.
People who could make it happen must be from the US.
:-/
One problem I foresee with smaller instances is discovery. As we know, if someone creates a new community somewhere else, your instance will onlyrecognise it once someone searches for it.
On a large instance like lemmy.world, there’s a good chance that someone else did, and you can stumble upon it by browsing /all. On a smaller instance this may not happen unless it’s set up to discover and thus mirror every community everywhere.
That’s why I populated /all with Lemmy Subscriber Bot
Interesting!
There’s a script for instance operators to run to fix that but I don’t have the link on me
I joined a local instance of mastodonte. I had days without being able to access my stuff, and finally recreated an account on the main mastodonte instance. So this time I directly picked a large instance.
I had similar issues, I joined a small Mastodon instance and for some reason couldn’t see comments or amounts of boosts. I guess it was just misconfigured
It is the strength and the weakness of it all.
On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.
There are these instance migration tools you can use to get things over to your new account.
GUI: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
What about the instances I created on Lemmy.world? Will I be able to moderate them from other instances?
You mean communities?
I’ve created the communities on Lemmy.world already, can I add moderation permissions to another account on another instance or am I required to moderate Lemmy.world communities/forums on Lemmy.world?
you can mod users from other instances
So that means I can add moderator permissions to users on other instances?
Yes
Lemmy.world’s issues at present are due to DDOS attacks, not high user count
And joining another instance is a great way to continue browsing through those attacks.
I’m not sure I understand. If I joined lemmy.world and subbed to stuff I like that has enough users to be interesting you’re saying, unsubscribe from those and join a different one with less users? I don’t know how that’s supposed to work?
Or are you saying join a different sever, log in there, and then pull the content from lemmy.world? That somehow helps with the load?
Lemmy is decentralized but completely connected together. I am on lemm.ee but I can still subscribe and comment to Lemmy.world or any number of other communities. The website you type in to visit Lemmy doesn’t matter. All Lemmy instances go to the same place. OP is arguing that a large centralized instance is bad which I don’t think anybody can disagree with. Lemmy.world has been down like every day. Tons of stability/DDOS issues but that only affects communities/users localized on that instance. Problem is that’s like half of the active Lemmy users right now.
Right but that doesn’t answer my question, is he literally just suggesting people go somewhere else?
To move somewhere else doesn’t mean to lose your subscriptions in the context of lemmy. What he means is if your main account on lemmy.world and it’s down, you won’t be able to (temporarily) access both your account(=your subs) and lemmy.world’s communities, while if your account on smaller (more stable) instance, it would only affect you by losing access to lemmy.world’s communities, but other subbed communities would still work/appear in your feed.
Hope that explains it.
Ahhh gotchya thanks!
don’t see the benefit tbh. software will scale, or not, if not people will leave for others
Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!
Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.
Same here. My main account is on lemmynsfw and it’s down atm :/
I get irritated when browsing and a message is on another server and it asks me to log in again. Starting to make me mad.
Im new, what do you mean by message being on another server? Do you mean a post?
Suppose someone sent you a lemmy link like this:
lemmy.example.com/post/12345.Now, you have an account on another instance called
lemmy.test, also logged in and want to comment. But opening the original linklemmy.example.com/post/12345still treats you as being unlogged, because it looks logins fromlemmy.example.com, notlemmy.testor any other federated instances.The solution, for now, is to use the search* function from your instance (
lemmy.test) by pasting the original link (lemmy.example.com/post/12345). That gives you a URL that’s compatible with your login inside your own instance:lemmy.test/post/98765.You can do this (or rather, have to do this) with communities or user links too.
I heard there are browser extensions doing this automatically, but haven’t tried. Mobile apps should have better support.
* Edit: I remember being able to do this but now its not working. Perhaps something changed? I recommend using browser extensions or mobile apps that should take care of this automatically.
Edit 2: I realized how to obtain the actual working link.
Thanks for the detailed reply :)
there are browser extensions doing this automatically
I don’t think that’s technically possible, or it would require a substantial effort. Comments and posts are stored with an instance-specific ID. There is no nice way to determine if this ID matches an ID on another instance.
I would be very happy to learn I’m wrong on this one. So if anyone knows a solution, please let me know.
This is the one I’ve seen https://github.com/cynber/lemmy-instance-assistant
Yes
I really want to see a data viz of whether/how much users are spreading out. Anyone got the data on user counts over time by instance?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Use 1m column for monthly active users
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance
But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.
If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.
But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.
But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.
You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.
Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won’t appear in everyone’s feed until I subscribe to it?
They don’t have to subscribe, but somebody has to have searched specifically for that community, so kinda yes.
People here promote scripts and bots so that an instance gets automatically subbed to new communities - which ok, but then which small instances really want to mirror the whole Fediverse? Most will run out of hard drive space, and we’re back at square one.
There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.
Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.
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Have a look at my other comments in the thread
