Looks like beehaw.org is down
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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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.)
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.
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?
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.)
It seems the lemmy.ml instance is really slow, times out, etc. I fear this will be a bad experience for new users migrating from reddit. Anything we can do? Any place to donate to scale it up, or would it be a good idea for existing users to migrate ourselves to different instances?
edit: I did find the donate heart at the top. Not sure how fast that'll improve things but I did make a small donation.
the more immediate solution is that they removed lemmy.ml from the recommended instances page https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Is there any way to help out with hardware when you are peaking ? I don't have the necessary knowledge about the fediverse, but I was thinking connecting my own server, or perhaps just open a 'help out' page where some webassembly/webrtc is taking some of your peak load ?
I wouldn't mind opening an extra 'worker' page or having a helper service on my server, when I feel the lemmy server is peaking.
I checked the documentation, but I have no idea how to move from one instance to another. Is it because beehaw.org is also struggling or am I just too dumb for this?
hehe just recovered my 3 year old account
checkmate!
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.
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"?
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.
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?
You have to create a new account. But that's easy ;)
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.
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!
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