lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead
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.
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!
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?
choosing the name for my instance was easy. programming related? programming.dev it is!
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. 🤷
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
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.
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?
When you open a post it should show you instructions on the right: use the search bar in lemmy.ml to search for
[email protected]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!
YetAnotherLemmy.Social coming online now soon?
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.
Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You're welcome there.
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:
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.
@[email protected] 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.
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.
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
Nah people will find it. Right now it should be just about growth and then let it specialise from there
Perhaps the default should be a per-instance setting and/or a user preference.
I would agree with a per user or per instance
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.
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.
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.)
Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.
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
averageusers (i.e not multi account users.Multiple accounts needed for
maximum uptimeon 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 seethings, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.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.
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.
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.
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.
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
For sure for sure, can't be easy keeping up with the sudden influx as it is, let alone launching new features.
Are you a Lemmy dev or just vocal here and on github?
I'm not a dev, no. But I've been here a while and like to help out :)
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.
That's me right now.
Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn't have communities I want.
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.
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.
I went for beehaw first too, couldn't get registration to respond but then saw they didn't offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.
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.
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?
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?
As @[email protected] 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.
But I’ve already signed up as GuyDudeman on every Lemmy instance! What happens to all those accounts? 🤪
They become the components of a giant Combining Mecha.
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.
Then people would start name-squatting and you would end up with people having to resort to [email protected] just because someone on a totally different instance already registered [email protected]. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it's probably not a good idea :)
We'd love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.
I'm happy to help if needed :)
I can handle some applications daily, and I'm also planning to grow some more niche communities :)
I mean I'd love to help - either modding someone's server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)
If needed, I'd also be more than happy to help.
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.
Agreed, someone needs to create an easy "sign up here" with a default option (maybe just randomize across various instances, not sure)
Randomizing would cause lots of issues since each instance has different rules and philosophies. It’s a difficult problem to solve.
https://join-lemmy.org/
We could just get all new users to sign up to lemmygrad
LOL! That would go well.
haha, everyone is free to request an account on lemmygrad
Kinda cancel out the far-right invasion of Voat? It's a line of reasoning, certainly.
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.
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.
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.
Mmm, dessert island.... drools
Yeah, federated logins of some sort would be really nice to have. There have been some mentions of integrating something from Streams onto Lemmy.
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 And just like Mastodon and the fediverse at large, after initial growing pains, we will find a way
@nutomic
Not only fediverse, back in the day when reddit was cool servers outages was a daily thing
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.
I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.
Pull requests welcome, here is the repo:
https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
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!
Is there any way to migrate instance or do I make a new account entirely?
I just created https://lemmy.studio/ for music-related discussions.
It's good to be popular. Congratulations on the growth!
Got my instance running earlier today thanks to some helpful people in the Matrix chat. Intention at the time was to have some friends of mine join but I'm not opposed to having signups as well. Long live open source, federated software!
Yay, congrats!
I guess every bigger instance needs to constantly promote a monthly support fee to keep the servers runnin. Something that most people already use and don't have to register first. Like PayPal or Patreon.
Edit: And I support Lemmy now on Patreon.
Link?
https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Is there any way to transfer an account to a different instance?
If server crashes again the devs should just stop all registrations to this instance, people always follow path of least resistance and the first dev instance is just too easy to be stuck onto
This option seems pretty nice. Especially if, when refused entry, there is an easy link to browse other instances.
would be nice to put a notice saying new user registration temp disabled. or on the join page the instances with disabled registration get hidden or pushed down
That's what Mastodon servers were doing after Twitter.
Mastodon.social didn't have load issues though, they just wanted to promote federation for the health of the network, and growth slowed down considerably because of it. Not that it was a bad move, but if lemmy wants to absorb reddits userbase it will not work, because elon musk isn't a constant presence of vile encouraging migration unlike on twitter. reddit knows how to manage negative users, just look at what they did about alien blue. 4 years of premium and all was forgotten/forgiven.
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.
Yeah, I think I have two accounts (I registrated in a community and then came here and had to create another one because I couldn't log in). It's kind of confusing for people who are not as tech savy as myself.
Well, my understanding is your user exists on whatever instance you signed up on. You could technically create users on every single instance, but that is not necessary. You only need one user to exist somewhere, and then you can subscribe to, and post to communities on other instances.
For example: from lemmy.ml, if you search for
[email protected]you can then open the sidebar and subscribe to, and post to, the gaming community on beehaw.org with your lemmy.ml user.![email protected] is not the same community as [email protected]
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
An easy way to understand this is that instances are like email providers. You can sign up on Gmail, but still email someone using Outlook or something else.
That analogy makes a lot of sense. Very helpful to new users
Is there a feature to send a read-only/static link to Lemmy pages?
I’m envisioning a pre-cached version of the page that is updated hourly or so, rather than querying the database live for every comment on the thread. In a perfect world, these could also be offloaded to a CDN as static pages…
I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.
This is one of the biggest hurdles to get into Lemmy. I consider myself quite tech savvy but I am at a stage of my life that I cannot read hundreds of page of documentation just to use a forum.
There need to be a way to seamlessly move people from instance to another without them having to do it themselves or at the least a way way shorter documentation that goes to the point in one page.
I’ve only been here a day or so, but having to search for the community doesn’t seem that bad? It’s almost exactly like searching for a subreddit to join.
/r/subredditturns into!community@address, like [email protected]And once you are on that community you can open the sidebar and subscribe (join in Reddit terms).
I just created https://lemmy.film if that would be useful for anyone.
Sorry for contributing towards this by registering but I'm very appreciative of the work being done to facilitate this community. I hope to see Lemmy grow with the negative direction other platforms are taking.
I'm a noob. I created an account on beehaw and on lemmy.ml. That's because I see communities on one instance that I'm interested in and a different community on another instance. So if there's a technology community on both, how do I get to see all the technology posts without having to have two accounts?
This is really confusing for noobs like me. I'd just like to see one community to technology, one for Science, one for nintendo etc. I don't care it it's spread out amongst different servers to divvy up the load, but from the user side, it needs to be seamlessly integrated.
I'm still learning how all this works though. But I don't know how many folks that are more casual than me will be willing to figure it out. I hope they do though! It'll be worth it to leave reddit in the rearview mirror!
Edit: lawdy, I just figured it out. Local vs all on the communities list. It was right in front of my face. good grief!
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.
well, what can be done to help with upgrades to this server? what does that entail?
This site is hosted on a VPS from ovh.com. I upgraded it from 4 vCPU to 8.
fascinating. what's the monthly cost increase to go to 12 or 16 cpus? cuz that's gonna happen, and I should set aside some cash for a donation.
I wonder if Google is still offering their C3 public preview, for zero cost during the trial period. I saw on my dashboard something ridiculous like spinning up 176 vCPU / 352GB RAM for $0, and just paying $1 for 10GB persistent disk. Heck they offer like a $300USD credit for the first 90 days to try stuff out…
holy poopies, are you serious? that's... that's something. until, of course, they release their pricing scheme and convert you in the middle of the night.
still, though... how does that compare to AWS, or what are comparable service pricing schemes?
Keep in mind that’s in CAD dollars… but still :)
i think i can swing $1.10 in MapleBucks
Edit: Seriously, though, I see what you mean. can you scale down? like, to, I dunno... 24 or 32 CPUs? What's that price?
That picture reminds me of those old infomercials that would be like
GET 1 TOWELY FOR JUST $0.99, BUT WAIT, CALL NOW, AND WE WILL INCLUDE 99 MORE MICROFIBER TOWELS FOR FREE!
Can an instance be distributed across multiple machines?
Soo, stupid question maybe but how does federation work with your own instance?
I've set up a solo instance using ansible and subscribed to ![email protected]. If I wanted my ALL page populated with posts from other lemmy.ml communities, would I have to subscribe to each individually? Or does my instance fetch lemmy.ml's Local eventually?
I've confirmed that federation is working using the method described in lemmy's docs and lemmy.ml (+ a few other instances) is listed under "Allowed instances" in my admin panel.
Is there anyway to scale an instance by adding more nodes? Not be adding additional instances, but more of a distributed load balancing for a given instance? What about migrating communities to a different hardware instance? What scaling challenges does Lemmy face that something like Mastondon doesn't?
I'm sure there are many folks (myself included) who have technical resources that are not community builders. I'm sure if there if there is a way to spread the load, enough folks want this to succeed to make it work.
Saldy it's very common to have this influx towards the "main server" as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.
Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.
I don't think you can expect the bulk of reddit (not technical) user base to care or know what federation is.
If people need to hunt out servers they will stay on something centralized until an alternative takes over.
Hence why Mastedon is dead in the water.
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.
thanks for the quick answer!
That's a bummer but it is good to know.
Currently you have to start over.
I know I'm being a bit pushy at this point, but distributing instance load can be helped in some part by merging this PR and deploying the latest changes (including more languages and recommended instances as well) :)
How/which URL should we link to then? Now is the best time to get users to switch to Lemmy so we need to make it as newbie friendly as possible. Already the application process has put off some people (I do like that bit though, keeps away the low effort folks). Thanks.
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?
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!
You are free to learn to program and write a user import routine for lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
I know how to program, I also know how to wonder how many instances are running off the docker-compose with publicly exposed postgres... that would make import/export really easy, wouldn't it? 🙄
Anyway, would you say this isn't the right place to discuss this stuff?
Why would this be not the right place?
You tell me, you sent me away.
I think data protection, retention, access, rectification and deletion laws are going to hit anyone hosting an instance. The EU is also in the process of introducing a "data migration" law, that is mostly targeted at "large" social media, but we'll see what ends up getting approved.
I'm not a compliance expert, but what I know about these laws makes me fear setting up an instance just to get hit by whatever fines.
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...
If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.
Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @[email protected]
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'm going to setup a Lemmy node. I'm not on lemmy.ml anyway, but I want this platform to r0ck!
I'll lean it up ASAP!
I know it probably won't be fun for you hosting, but this makes me happy! Hopefully Lemmy will grow a lot!
Are there any published guidelines on the server requirements for an instance? I have my own instance running, seems to be working fine. But I'm reluctant to open it publically without an idea of if I'm setting myself up for failure or not.
Related, is there a way to entirely disable image uploads to my instance? I'm ok with it being a "reader" instance, but don't want to be hosting content directly.
@ devs:
Can you please focus your work on optimising performance for the UI? It will greatly reduce the amount of electricity and money spent, so you're actually multiplying every tenth of a second you can shave off of CPU time...
Thank you a lot for writing this software. It's been a great little project so far and it seems to go down the Mastodon route of increased popularity. Be proud!
We're about 80% done with a big rework of the UI to switch from websockets to http. This should solve most of the stability and performance issues of both the front and back end.
Huh, I thought websockets are far more efficient that http.
The sends might be... but keeping rooms of hundreds of active users open, much more difficult.
Yes I would have thought too, also I am seeing comments about high-cpu count VM but the bottleneck shouldn't be CPU per say. Maybe the database? Or code related issues, I see the back-end is written in Rust so it's not an inefficient language problem.
I am wondering if this is also the case a thousand of redundant requests that would need a clever caching system. Such system are fine in theory but quiet a task to implement.
Damn I am veeery excited!! Do you have an ETA? No pressure though :)
It's our top priority rn.
Great to hear, thank you for the update!
No probs!
lemmy devs are the best in the business hands down 💪
Crashing with 994 users online?
that's not a good look
I guess it’s good news that a lot of people are migrating from other sites like me
Yeah. Fuck Reddit and their stupid policies. I hope this will be a great alternative for Reddit communities
I run a general purpose, (currently) single-user instance as of yesterday. It will be funded through end of 2023 and then I'll probably beg for donations if I host other users. https://links.dartboard.social
This is hosted on Digital Ocean and I can scale up CPU/RAM/Storage/Bandwidth as needed. (I already did once)
Single user instances are really great for the health of the network too.
Agreed. How I've approached my akkoma instance (dartboard.social) - if someone else joins, great, I'll put in effort to make the instance a safe and accommodating space for them. If it's just me, then that's great too.
That's interesting, why do you think so? Don't they just take the load of a single user?
They take load off of servers, help with decentralization, create local cached versions of content that could be resurrected if necessary.
Is there a tipping point where it's a net loss? If I understand the protocols correctly, the whole back end federation part of the equation is push based, so if everyone was running their own instance, lemmy.ml would have to push every post to every individual instance in the network. At some point isn't it more efficient to only have to serve posts when people come here to look at them?
Network pushes like that aren't resource intensive at all.
The only negative IMO, is community discovery. Which tools can always come out in the future that help with this. We could even embed these into lemmy-ui in some way.
example: https://browse.feddit.de
Oh another one: redundant hard drive space.
@dessalines @knova Not so great for trying to find people to follow though? Unless I'm missing something..?
I'm curious about people starting up: Are you storing images on your own site with this instance?
Yes, but I’m a single user instance currently so it wasn’t a concern for me. I also have like 20GB of storage so I have some time even if others join me.
How are you monitoring for illicit images? How does any instance do that? And because of federation, is there no way to ever delete those images?
This becomes more of a problem as the community gets bigger. I have no automated way to monitor for that stuff now.
Federation doesn’t affect my ability to delete an image uploaded to my server. When something federates out to another server, I don’t think a copy of the image is saved - it’s more like a pointer - “hey this post + image are saved on this server”
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.
Beehaw has a concerning financial post at the top of their frontpage that may indicate they might struggle too when the massive wave of Reddit exodus occurs.
I guess I have to figure out what instances to suggest to people. I do find that direct instance suggestions is the way to go, so I guess I gotta write up a list.
Ideally, some pre-existing communities on Reddit would create their own instances similar to how often they have their own Discords, and have large amounts of users migrate that way. But there's a huge, wide, amount of technical difference between those two things. You can't exactly easily find capable Lemmy admins.
If anybody else is lost and wants a basic general-purpose home for their account, https://lemm.ee is on good hardware and open for signups.
Ok. I have what might be a strange question. Can you host a server but disable community creation (even if only temporarily)? So, the server would essentially just be a platform from which others could access content published elsewhere in the Fediverse. I'm assuming the load would then be on the database behind my instance, correct?
I'm a Platform/Cloud/DevOps Engineer (the titles are always changing) working in software. I'm reasonably sure I could host an instance to help out without much difficulty. But I'm not sure I'm ready to jump into the moderator role, though I realize I'll need to deal with those who break some basic rules.
Oooh so this is why it's lagging extremely, guess I'll go on the grad for a few days, or weeks
I applied for behaw about 24 hours ago without response nor success logging in. Wondering if they have temporarily suspended applications?
Same here! I was starting to think my application was rejected. So I signed up here on lemmy.ml and was approved fairly quickly.
It's been 72 hours now since I applied to beehaw and still radio silence.
I haven’t heard anything either. They are probably slammed. 🤷🏻♂️
You can still subscribe to and post to their communities from here. You don’t actually need a user on beehaw.org
Open the hamburger menu, then click the search icon and put
[email protected]in the search box and click search. You’ll then be able to look at that community from lemmy.ml, and in the sidebar you can subscribe. You can also up and downvote, comment, etc.Replace gaming with whatever community you are trying to join. Also beehaw.org is just an example. You can “join” any instance that isn’t currently blocked by lemmy.ml AFAIK.
what hamburger menu. right now i'm using the default lemmy.ml website
The three parallel horizontal lines in the top right next to the bell icon.
Ok, in the jerboa app
They might just have a massive backlog. They're at the top of the "Suggested instances" section.
Can I login to another instance with my lemmy.ml account? Or do I need multiple accounts?
You need an account with that instance to log in. Once logged in though you can post on any community, as long as your instance federates with the instance where that community is.
One thing cool about piped.video (Youtube frontend), you can use the same login on different instances.
That's something that should exist on fediverse, you use the same account created on mastodon.social and login with the same on lemmy.ml
An account on a given instance only lets you log on to that instance. You can use that account to interact with people from other instances, however.
@CannotSleep420 @cosmicsploogedrizzle Hello from Mastodon.
Has there been discussion of using OAuth 2? People could use their Google or even WIkipedia login (if you wanted a less-corporate provider).
Not yet. It would be a good idea for an issue, although like you hinted at there may be hesitation to use corporate services.
I signed up on lemmy org uk originally (day or 2 ago) and now it seems to be gone. If I could have kept my account some how that would have been better, but here I am instead.
Was it badly aministered or it has been done on purpose so that people think lemmy is not reliable ?
I have no idea. Pretty sure it only lasted a week or so. Maybe the server owner had some issues they couldn't resolve.
If it comes back, maybe I'll find out
I was contemplating signing up on that instance but couldn't find anything about who runs it, or how likely it was to stick around. I think there was also a thread on there where they refused to accept donations too.
With an average VPS running you about 100-200 quid a year, as a hobby I think it's gonna get expensive when you need to upgrade cores, storage etc. Not to mention you also need to moderate the instance.
For hosting a federated Lemmy to work I think you need a team and possibly a plan for accepting donations if it can't be run out of pocket
I wish I'd noted the user name of the server owner, I think they were on mastodon.
I like to call Lemmy "Feddit".
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.
There is a new announcement saying they upgraded hardware yet again
@[email protected] 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 believe the only way to get Lemmy working with every "refugees" is indeed to run organised instances. I'm thinking of a Circlejerk instance (yeah sorry, first example I had in mind) with all the jerk communities such as r/Watchescirclejerk, r/Carcirclejerk, etc... Could work for countries, car, music communities... I might be wrong though as I'm quite new to all of this.
No idea if you're into it, but I'm working on running my own organized instance for popheads, think Taylor Swift, Camila Cabello, Lana Del Rey, there are dozens, if not hundreds of subs in that category that I think deserve their own instance. (Even SwiftieCircleJerk, which I love)
If you're one of them, registrations are open on mine, https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech
Not knocking the original idea, but since this isn't Reddit, I don't think we need "circlejerk" communities until the communities here become large enough to have CJ style takes to lampoon. Otherwise they'd all be satirizing Reddit and since this isn't Reddit, maybe that's best avoided?
Could probably just be meme communities
Yeah, obviously. My point wasn’t "Damn we need those Circlejerks on Lemmy asap" haha. Just that we might need organised instances, sorted by specific subjects : animals, cars, music, food, etc.
If I were to host an instance, let’s say for music, its communities could be guitar, piano, every instruments, and why not genre : baroque, classic, romantic, etc… So that people would know where to go to talk music.
Having many generic instances with clone subs on each (like memes, technology, politics, whatever) won’t help audience development and instance hosting I guess.
I like that, then you'd have servers that can develop a sort of "style" and users could browse other communities from that server if they enjoyed another one.
Ultimately you're right that having topics fragmented over multiple instances has natural risks, I think this is also something that will have a natural evolution where some will become the largest ones, others will die down and smaller ones will have to offer a more niche specialty to attract users.
Your server will be secondary to which communities you choose to subscribe to, but I'm sure that they'll still have nice general chats and whatnot that you can participate in.
We already have tools to navigate existing communities and I'm sure it'll only get better, then you can have a discovery solution for all servers and natural selection will do the rest.
It would be nice to have a gaming instance, with game specific "subs", Console and PC gaming subs, Retro gaming and Emulation subs.
I absolutely agree. I'd love hosting/paying for a server but it seems a bit tricky for me atm. I guess a "Lemmy server setup for dummies" would be great !
True, otherwise we can donate to existing servers to help too.
This is inevitable if feddit is going to become mainstream. People have a herd mentality, if Lemmy is going to become popular there will always be a handful of instances that are much more popular than the others. These popular instances will need to scale (both vertically and horizontally) while the smaller instances will probably keep getting by with a single server. This is the same way email providers work, half the people I know use gmail, and most of the others use another large provider like yahoo or hotmail. It's just the way this is going to have to work. People want to join an instance with their friends, even if they're all federated together. They want to know that the instance they sign up for has peer approval and it's already a tried and trusted one.
So, might I recommend having a button on the top bar that shows us the instances we've subscribed to, and maybe a quick link to the list of available instances? People like easy navigation, having to do multiple bookmarks or navigate through finding a link to the list of servers is not easy navigation.
It also avoids centralization. sopuli.xyz has a list of alternate communities to the ones on lemmy.ml.
Would be really nice if on the instance page you could have some extra information admins could fill in like max capacity and such, think that people would be more inclined to choose other instances if they could see how close the instance is to the approximate member limit
I am trying to start my own instance, but this documentation is broken.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/from_scratch.html
I have gone through it three times now.
The daemon on Ubuntu won't start because of permission issues.
thread 'main' panicked at 'Failed to load settings file: LemmyError { message: None, inner: No such file or directory (os error 2), context: "SpanTrace" }', /home/ubuntu/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/lemmy_utils-0.17.3/src/settings/mod.rs:18:33
Because of how rust/cargo installs their "registry"
Fix the docs and I will start another instance ASAP.
You could try asking that question in Lemmy support community, I'm just a random user xD
Search for lemmy_support and it should turn up (if you're an lemmy.ml)
I successfully installed it following this instructions https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html and using this repo https://github.com/zxk7516/lemmy
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.
Have we started the fire?
@Designate6361 We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
@nutomic
We didn't start the fire. No we didn't light it but we tried to fight it.
is there a way to see new users stats somewhere ?
https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉
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.)
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 🎂
It seems like a common issue among ActivityPub services that people flock to the most popular instance and this causes problems. Why can't load balancing happen transparently? It seems like the main thing that actually makes a difference between which instance users want to join is what the moderation will be like. Like I don't want to be forced to sign up for an instance with a high amount of censorship compared to the rest of instances.
So maybe user registration should start from a centralized site that can describe the trade-offs of joining the various instances, and users don't get to select their specific instance by default, but rather they select based on a loose moderation policy, and then load-balancing occurs on the backend.
EDIT: I also want to be able to migrate between instances without losing my community subscriptions.
I'm happy with Feddit ^_^
At what point do you plan to close this instance to new users?
Thar she blows!
Is there a way to sort new Lemmy instances ? I check Lemmy on a daily basis for joining new instances that meet my interest. I wish there is a way to check only the new instances, maybe email notifications or something ?
I was approved for both lemmy.ml and Beehaw. I kind of got into a groove on Beehaw and tried to delete Lemmy.ml, but it wouldn’t let me. Is that going to create any problems if I just stay signed off?
Nope, none at all. A signed off user is one that's not causing server load :P
Being new to federated communities, this is good info! I’m also registered on both and hoping I wasn’t causing problems. Glad to hear it’s only when I log in :P
Can someone recommend me a vps service provider that works ideal for a lemmy instance ?
I just tried making an account on beehaw but I'm not able to login, are they having problems as well or do they have some kind of an account screening proccess that just takes awhile?
hehe just recovered my 3 year old account
checkmate!
What if I wanted to create an instance where upvotes are disabled? Could that be possible? @nutomic
I wouldn't mind running my own single user instance, but it seems a little challenging to set up rn. I would love to be able to set one up easily with a rasperry pi or my truenas core server.
A "single click" docker stack for unraid would a great option. Lots of DIY NAS systems out there
sounds like an interesting summer project
Lol yeah. I learned my lessons from using Matrix.
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
@nutomic For now I am using my brand new mastodon as backup, but I am thinking of joining kbin as well. So many options!
Have already moved - will keep hunting for the best instance for me but appreciate this Digg jr aka reddit killer.
Sad to hear that. I guess I will wait a bit for it to calm down then, because this has been my favourite instance.
Come join us at thebestinstance.com fam!
Looks like beehaw.org is down
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.
Might be a silly question, but: does ActivityPub support setting up a subinstance that gets its data from somewhere else? Traditionally you'd probably do that with a pgsql machine and multiple frontends, but having thought about it while typing this out, putting that load on the ActivityPub protocol would mean loading up the master to much the same extent as just having the traffic hit the master directly...
Does anyone know if social media is against Oracle cloud free tier ToS? I didn't see anything specific when I googled it, but ToS aren't always in that. Was trying to setup an instance on a smaller vps I have that's idle but 512MB won't cut it.
I'd suggest not to go with Oracle free tier. A lot of people are reporting having their instances completely removed without any communication, then support refusing to help. Would suck to have a community started to lose everything.
No. I don't think I will.
@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.
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.
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.
Well, I've moved out until this dies down. Leaving my lemmy.ml account inactive and living here for a while :)
If I setup my own lemmy instance. Will it have to be whitelisted by other communities for me to interact with them?
Is there an API for that returns the instance list is JSON?
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?
You make a new account on the other instance. There is no migration functionality (yet).
Does that mean that is a viable possibility that is being explored for the future? I would be interested to see how that works out in if there would need to be an "acceptance" from the admission of another instance, for example. It would certainly help lighten the load of users.
Thanks for everything you're doing.
Did my part and created an instance in the hopes of offloading some of the bigger instances: https://rammy.site
No clue if and how I should promote it, though. Looks like it's just me for now.
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.
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.
You should probably strike beehaw from your list of recommentations considering the agitation against this platform that they started running almost instantly
Hi,
I setup my account on lemmy.ca. But it seems I cannot sign into lemmy.ml with this account (just getting busy spinning circle. On a high level I want to subscribe to some of the communities on lemmy.ml.
Thanks
https://lemmy.ml/c/piracy
Is this why I can't create a new community? I've tried 3 times and it just keeps spinning when I hit submit.
Did you check that the community didn't already exist?
I did not! I'll own that, that was indeed my fault!
However, I didnt receive an error of any kind, once I clicked submit it just kept spinning with no reload or anything.
I'm going to open a GitHub issue for this.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Test
If anyone is looking for a new home I just started a new instance called wizanons.dev! We're magic themed and friendly! LGBTQIA+ friendly and we have a !magic community for aspiring wizards, mages, warlocks, and witches. Discussion on mysticism and psychedelics welcome! Always looking for more friendly apprentices and fellow arcane researchers.
something like lemmy-in.[tld] ?
That's not "true" decentralization, it's just another type of it. The fediverse uses a form called federation, while scuttlebut uses p2p.
No, p2p and federation are both different forms of decentralization
That has a serious problem. A lot of people post to social media from their phones over cell data. Hosting their own content on their phone would drain the battery and the cell data cap very quickly.
There is a truly decentralized reddit clone called aether.
Yeah, I signed up for lemmy.ml, but when trying to login I get stuck on an infinite loading button. I assume this is caused by the overloaded servers?
I got that earlier today as well. I wasn't sure if it was just overloaded or if it was a UX design oversight for accounts pending approval.
Edit: yeah, it must be the server load. I can't login from my other device.
Edit 2: nope, actually it seems to be a UX bug when the username or password is incorrect. Just keeps spinning instead of giving an error message.
https://lemmy.ml/c/piracy