this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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14 users here now

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

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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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[–] radarsat1@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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?

[–] TrippyTortuga@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] original_reader@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] TheYang@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] academician@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do Lemmy instances not scale horizontally?

[–] SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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 🎂

[–] bilb@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (11 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!

[–] bilb@lemmy.ml 2 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.

[–] Nicarlo@lemmy.ca 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

[–] autisticaudioguy@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] Nicarlo@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

Credits go to you for the naming

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[–] rusty_spoon@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.

[–] FaceDeer@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That's how I wound up here too.

[–] anji@lemmy.anji.nl 3 points 1 year ago (2 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.

[–] gnoop@lemmy.ml 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.

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[–] grant@toast.ooo 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉

[–] ionhowto@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (3 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.

[–] anders@rytter.me 3 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.

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[–] NicoCharrua@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

You can post on all platforms.

I'm on lemmy.ca and I can make posts and comments on lemmy.ml just fine.

On Jerboa its just as easy as posting on your own instance. Idk how it works on the website but I'm sure there's a way.

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[–] kunday@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] kunday@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

Done my bit, started with a 5 dollar donation, monthly!

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

For future reference, the heart button up top is for funding.

[–] interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 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.

[–] Neil@lemmy.ml 3 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.

[–] papasfritas@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

is there some kind of status page to have a look at and see how things are going? I cannot make any comments to a specific community at the moment and wondering why.

EDIT: Figured it out, when I tried to leave a comment via Jerboa I got an error "Language not allowed" and so I selected a language on the desktop site and then my comment went through. Note that this error does not appear on desktop site so I had no idea what was going on and why my comment was not going through

[–] comfy@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

@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.

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[–] 777@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] anders@rytter.me 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] ghostalmedia@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] vocornflakes@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I think that there should be some meaningful way to "preview" aspects of one instance that may make it more attractive than another instance to a new user. I just joined lemmy.world today simply because it seemed the most generic. Onboarding process could use some work; https://lemmy.world/post/37906 is great at explaining it but people will only really see it for the first time once they join...

Also I have no clue if that second link works. ¯\(ツ)

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[–] Gecko@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did 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...

[–] Neptune014@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

For non technical users, the idea of instances can be a very confusing concept (the email analogy is a good one but its still confusing for people). I know you guys have a lot on your plate in terms of development wise, however I hope that prioritizing keeping lemmy.ml up is high up there. I say this because its the instance that most users from Reddit will flock to. And the last thing they need is to create an account then have the site go down for 6 hours. I havent experienced it going down. Although hopefully you have a backup site for when it does (what I mean is just a page that says your down/your working on fixing it... Try these instances instead.)

[–] lightrush@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] arielbnz@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im a lemmy.ml user since 2021. I need to create a community 'goth-music-oriented' or need help to get /c/goth more visible (it doesn't appear in the lemmy community browsing.

The former community creator, Maya, i think she abandoned the community. Her last post was 2 years ago. Thank you in advance for any help.

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[–] DJDSXSHOWFX@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What if I wanted to create an instance where upvotes are disabled? Could that be possible? @nutomic

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[–] LibertyBeta@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.

[–] slashzero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

First post for me!

Sorry, I applied and got approved here. Still waiting to hear back from beehaw…

I’m really digging this UI compared to Reddit, but I am 99.9% a mobile user via the native Reddit app (don’t @ me!)

I am very tempted to setup my own instance. Wondering what resource usage looks like for an instance.

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[–] CanniBallistic_Puppy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like to call Lemmy "Feddit".

[–] bahcodad@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I like to call Reddit "Deaddit"

[–] Copio@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.)

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