[Done] Server will be migrated (More power!)
So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.
I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.
Wow that was fast.
this is very Reddit-y of you
Reddit moment-ception.
We did it, lemmy.world!
Mom, get the camera!
Redditors made such memes a thing, we're taking them with us where we go.
Unexpectedoffice
I will add, joking aside, that Ruud is doing a bloody good job (sorry, I don't know yet how to tag a user).
@[email protected] type the @ symbol and first few letters. a drop down menu should appear. it might delay by a few seconds.
Thanks!
You are welcome!
Thanks @BackOnMyBS
Wondering if Jerboa had this feature or it auto links..
Like this: @[email protected] parent thinks you're doing a bloody good job! (Me too!)
Thanks @[email protected] and @[email protected] !
Didn't realise you could respond with images on lemmy. Smoother jokes than r***it...
Well i just thought I’d give it a try and it worked. :)
When a volunteer can run a server better then a big tech company
unsurprising pikachu face
To be fair the volunteer isn't trying to squeeze value out of the users to inflate his IPO.
Won't somebody think about the corporations!
yes! I love the culture of this place so far
Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.
Which is a very good thing, because that's what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it's relying on donations for funding, I believe?
undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don't worry, you'll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.
Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.
Yeah, we can enjoy while it lasts, because with more users more questionable content will come
Found one russian troll already. Oh well..
Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.
you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again
wow, that's actually a really nice feature. I wonder how it works though, i guess their text just will be blacked out for me, or will the post and all answers to it be completely vanish?
They're only invisible to you, it's kind of like muting on Twitter more than blocking, as far as I understood. (I haven't felt the need to do it yet!)
Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there's a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol
what about that post made you think they were a russian troll?
I think they meant they've seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.
I ... Have to assume so, anyway
I think they meant they've seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.
I ... Have to assume so, anyway
that's what I assumed, but was trying to understand all the downvotes
What.
So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?
And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?
I'm a newbie from Reddit too, but your understanding matches mine.
Yes, lemmy.world, lemmy.film, beebaw and etc are other instances of Lemmy and users from other instances can interact with other instances.
And yes donations help the server afloat.
Pretty cool stuff.
Awesome, thank you for this information. I hope you have a great week!
That is correct. I've signed up for monthly donations to help cover costs (as well as added tip to help the admins themselves).
"Lemmy instances" are analogous to "email servers": your account is hosted on one of them, but you can communicate with people on other ones, because the servers know how to talk to each other.
Expanding the capacity of the Lemmy service will involve both (1) more instances, and (2) more resources for existing instances.
For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate... My friend gave me a great explanation:
Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]
Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
I'm not sure how its being done as far as the technical aspects but Ruud has done a great job as admin upgrading the servers to keep up and anticipating the flow of new users.
The same admin also has experience with a mastadon.world server that experienced lots of growth from Twitter users leaving over musk moves. So essentially we have a good admin as far as I can tell and it's not his first rodeo. Part of the reason I chose this server
I'm less concerned with the technical aspects and more curious about the long term.
Federated instances, such as lemmy.world, are operated by individuals; What happens if they decide to stop doing so without handing the server/data off to someone else? Do all of our accounts created here disappear? What do other users see if they click through my profile from a post on a different federated server? What happens to all of the content created on the server in question?
It would be gone.
The federated design has got people already thinking about it though. It's inevitable that some instances will just close without notice. So people are trying to figure out the best way to handle it, from archiving/mirroring to creating an export account feature.
It’s very early days and the projects will be developed quite extensively I imagine, this is a chance for some people like myself to contribute to new features and make a real impact on its future.
12k ??? That's crazy! It was only 500 when I joined 6 days ago, wow!
No worries for the downtime, when it's needed, it's needed :)
I’m glad to hear about the new users (I myself am one.) and the server upgrades!
I think lemmy.world suits me better than Beehaw. (great folks over there, no shade)
I like that lemmy.world let’s communities be openly created by users, as well as the inclusion of downvoting which I personally prefer.
The two day blackout was what finally got me to actually look into the fediverse, figure out servers and whatnot, and make an account to try it out. I've been meaning to look into it for a while, but the blackout was the push I needed. I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm far more interested in exploring this exciting new space then I am going back to the garbage filled Reddit, even if they miraculously back down on the API changes .
My reddit account was over 10 years old. This is my first comment on Lemmy/Fediverse.
Relate. 12 year account, would like to see this take off. They're not changing.
I will stay here. Did not have this feeling of internet independence for a very long time. I'm done with Reddit.
I'm just gonna browse both for a while I guess. I know I'm not downloading the official app on my phone though
I'm gonna browse Reddit occasionally as well due to its large back content, albeit with adblocks and privacy extensions up and running, but I will only post here. Might be a good idea to mirror anything I end up referring to on Reddit.
Iirc somebody is working on a mirror system. I'll try find it but it's on Reddit somewhere.
I know I won't!
I don't plan on it. RIF was my main way of browsing Reddit so once that goes, that's pretty much me done. I'll probably still peruse sysadmin for work purposes, but my Reddit time will become Lemmy time.
I am in a transition period where I still keep Apollo installed, and trying to find enough communities here in order to be somewhat ready for the July 🙈
I have deleted nearly 10 years worth of content and account already. Those leaving should do the same.
I'm more or less getting what I wanted out of reddit out of lemmy already. There are a few teething pains, but overall it reminds me of the nice little community we had at reddit in 2007. It got better and better until about 2012 after the big digg migration where it started to peak and devolve. I would love to relive those first 5 years here again. I don't miss reddit at all.
Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there's a good way to predict load based on number of users.
Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.
Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.
The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @[email protected] is currently doing.
Worth noting that typical app scaling does not scale linearly, and hardware caps out at some point (with diminishing returns up to that point) - federation will help with that much cheaper where normally a company would just have to throw more money at more servers themselves :)
Yup. You don’t have to explain that to me. It’s funny when folks assume:
Yeah, I meant specific data using lemmy.world as a datum, not the theoretical "check and see if you guessed right" method.
Lemmy.world is fantastic, thanks for your efforts. It fit perfectly with all the criteria I had when choosing where to host my account.
That being said, I wish Lemmy.ml, the "main" Lemmy instance, more often registered communities created here. At the moment, most people just search for communities there and many of our own don't show up because no user from that instance interacted with our new and growing communities just yet - not only does this create a fragmentation issue, but given the massive load spike, Lemmy.ml is actually running a bit slow whereas Lemmy.world is handling posts better, making interaction easier specially when migrating users from Reddit or other places. For instance, my GameBoy community is ready, with users, and I'm about to post some good content - but as far as someone from Lemmy.ml is concerned, no such community exists.
Awesome to see so much growth. I just joined yesterday and I guess I'm not alone!
What's the operating cost? Thank you, for running this server! :)
The cheapest configuration for that server on Hetzner is about €150 per month.
Honestly cheaper than I would have expected. However, still a nice chunk of money to shell out for a community, and for that, I commend.
Tree fiddy
I gave him a dollar
You what, woman?!
Damn lock ness monster
I really appreciate what you're doing, but I'm worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to "just join a new instance 4head" and that just...doesn't have a good experience.
This server can easily host 1M users.
Most stress on the server comes from all the signups and newcomers posting a lot. After a while that becomes less. On Mastodon, the first days in November I had over 100k active users. Now I have 165k accounts but around 32k active.
And I'm sure the Lemmy devs will also improve the performance of the site. They never really had to, a few days ago the total number of Lemmy users over all instances was 7k.
Is data actually replicated among the different servers? Is (data from other servers) just cached temporarily or is it permanently stored on local DBs?
I checked lemmy docs but I couldn't find a clear answer.
I was wondering what kind of strain the immense influx of people could put on network and DBs other than just servers, specifically in case of the number of servers raising a lot, not just users on a single server.
Ya what are the limitations with scaling horizontally? Scaling up is a stop gap.
Ruud, thank you for your investment here though.
I'm not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn't seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?
Look at the pricing!
Hetzner wants 150€ for this server. 3TB disk is 50€ extra. So 200€ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6¢ per user and month. This should be very manageable.
Also it doesn't mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.
They are already raising 600€ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.
But you are right with something else:
Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.
Reddit is not a "simpler setup". Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They're just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.
Was thinking the same thing, is a lemmy instance supposed to be literally a single server instance?
I'm also interested in the answer to this question.
do you plan to publish any of your scaling data? Some others might consider helping by running large instances and your learnings would be incredibly helpful.
Yes, when I get around to it I can create a post about it. And of course, feel free to ask.
if you had any basic numbers easily accessible like iops peak and average or screen shots of your dashboard showing resource utilization would do wonders. Right now you are getting slammed but are operational (barely) you have the upper bound config for a 12k user system at least right now ;-)
King Ruud is good to us
Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn't work at all, hindering community discovery.
Thanks!
This is how I understand it: a current limitation (feature?) Is that you can only search from your instance to other communities if someone from your instance has interacted with it. But if you use https://browse.feddit.de/ you can search across all instances. Then subscribe to it, or search the whole url in your own instances search. Once an instance interacts with another, now other people from your instance can search for it by simple name.
Oh, so it is due to the larger userbase here! There is a larger chance that someone already subscribed to a community I am looking for.
Still, when I was using another instance, subscribing to communities at lemmy.world was instantaneous while subbing to communities at beehaw.org or lemmy.ml often took more than one try.
It also doesn't help that lemmy.ml where a lot of users migrated at first seems to be having issues right now.
Also on jerboa searching for communities by url doesn't seem to be working.
Hopefully the influx of new users and attention helps improving and ironing some issues like it happened with mastodon.
This was exactly my issue. My feddit.uk instance was very slow. Couldn't interact or search on Jerboa using URL. Lemmy.World instace is much better. Donation to the cause on the way.
anyone knows what does the "subscribe pending" means??
I think it's happening when instances are running into lag federating with each other, and means that content from that community might take a while to populate your subscribed feed.
eg my subscription to Kbin's gaming community shows up as pending, but federation with kbin has been broken for a while because of their cloudflare settings. guessing these sorts of pending things will clear up once things settle down a bit.
Thanks for the explanation.
likely an issue with your request, i've had the same issue on multiple occasions, usually fixed by clicking the pending button and then resubscribing, takes a few tries sometimes
So, mostly correct. Lemme clarify:
If you do a URL search in the communities page (with all settings set to "All", even "Communities"), your instance will pull in a few of the latest posts and comments. Not anything too heavy, just enough to give you an idea of what's going on.
The moment a single user on your instance subscribes, your instance will start pulling in everything from that community. If every instance pulled in every community from every other instance, the network would be very vulnerable to a botspam instance that goes up would crash everything. Much better for an instance to only pull in communities that people are interested in.
can the instance owner limit the rate of amount pulled? Say, if a malicious user joins a small server, and then subs every known nsfw instances' communities what then? Like is lemmy by default a whitelist approach or blacklist? (or maybe somewhere in the middle?)
An instance owner decides. You can either make it whitelist or blacklist, your choice.
ahh, thanks, good to know. :)
Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!
Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.
I’ll give it a shot! Edit: love the fact that click to collapse is back. No search bar, account info and the occasional crash but the feed looks great! Looking forward to future updates
Yeah, have still ran into a few bugs but definitely moving in the right direction.
iOS only? Or also Android? Btw, you receive notifications on Jerboa? What do you use for Lemmy on Android?
Only on iOS, but afaik there are a few options on android atm.
I supposed due comparative of Apollo. I will download it on my iPad. On Android I'm using Jerboa, which is beautiful and intuitive, but have a lot of stuff to improve and doing some things news and better! But is the version 0.0.30 so is relatively new, and is the app of the official staff. The app you mentioner for iOS costs moneyonf AppStore?
Nope, its free and oss. It's in beta rn though so it has to be installed through testflight. They have a channel over on lemmy.ml https://lemmy.ml/c/mlemapp.
What do you mean need installed through testflight?I'm not an expert on iOS, I just have an iPad that a relative gifted to me.
It's an app to allow for beta software on ios
Thank you!!
Umm I joined at 2k users now there are over 15k. Damn this is exploding.
Maybe Reddit signed a little death sentence with APIpocalypse. Elon did same shit and Twitter actions in stock market dropped a lot! (even more than with adquisition). Reddit wants go to stock market soon.
Bad move u/spez and Reddit staff!
Loving it more and more each day :)
We are growing too powerful!
Thanks for hosting a great community!
Would be awesome if you create some group chat (e.g. Discord?) and add sysadmins/devops to it. Would be more than happy to assist, especially if you have questions or need opinions.
I've been working as sre/sysadmin/devops for the past ~5 years and ~9 years of (Arch) Linux user. More than 1K Arch Wiki edits over that period of time.
Good idea!
I might be interested in helping, DevOps engineer as well. ☺️
Feel free to ping me as well if something sets up. I currently don't have the time or personal grit to run a full instance on my own, but I know how to run linux, postgres, mysql, networks and other things. Ansible/Chef mostly as well, some puppet, some salt. Been doing this for 10 years or so on different stacks.
I'd be happy to be part of some "Lemmy-OPs-Support" group, wherever it may be to chime in with experience.
I think this is a great idea as well. I don't have quite the experience set of @ziiki_transport2 (Primary PSE) but am sure I could pitch in, in some way. Would be a good venue for brainstorming ideas as well(not that you seem to need it ;))
Wouldn't something like a Matrix server be more in line with the 'philosophy' of the fediverse?
Reddit is for Lemmy as Discord is for Spacebar (works with Discord) https://github.com/spacebarchat/spacebarchat
All hail ruud
/u/ruud(does that work?) Oh I have to make an actual link?Oh and fuck spez.
Guess not. Anyone know how to tag users?
Agreed, fuck spez
@[email protected]
Oh I see. Thanks.
Actually I don't see... Do you just make a link?
You can manually make the link, or just start typing the “@ruud” part and you should get a drop-down with auto-complete options. Selecting one of the options will create the link for you.
It does have a small delay for the pop up to appear when typing.
Just donated $10! Appreciate all the work you all are doing to keep up with the growth.
@[email protected], I just want it to be known that you rock. Fucking thank you for all the hard work!
sounds good. i mean it is only 10 to 30 minutes no login and lemmy.world content but because of the decentralization content from other servers should still be viewable. To the reader: it would be nice it you pay money IF you can. Server bandwidth is a problem that can mostly be solved by throwing money at it
Thank you very much. The welcome for all us reddit refugees has been really warm and it's deeply appreciated.
Just subbed to the Patreon!
Came here from Reddit and I already love it so much more! :)
The OpenCollective link seems to be reaching an error page a, FYI.
It didn't work for me until I created an account. Once I confirmed my account via the email link, it took me to the page to donate to mastodon.world directly.
For me too
Yeah very strange. I copied the URL from the browser, where I see it working. Then when I click the link it doesn't work. Odd.
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworldis the linkThat's so strange, I've been getting the same thing. Going to the link directly failed, but searching for
mastodonworldand clicking on the link somehow worked. Now it seems to be working again 🤷Yeah, the link is correct. I tried 2 mobile browsers - that may be the issue. Will visit it from the desktop once I get home
Thanks for everything so far. Will definitely be donating
Thanks Ruud!
so cool getting to see this thing grow in real time
Thank you for making this happen! Just signed up for a regular donation to help with costs 👍
I’m just another reddit refugee but I wanted to say thank you for your time, effort and money. As I slowly come to terms with federation I see why some are so passionate about it.
So my Patreon subscription has paid off already! 😁
@[email protected] DM me if you need help setting up monitoring/alerting on server health. IRL I'm on an SRE team, so happy to help where I can!
Be interesting to see. I'd assume the db is the bottleneck, would be nice to get stats on that. Should point the way to scaling more economically, i.e. well spec'd DB server and cheaper app server(s).
Could also use something like https://github.com/awslabs/pgbouncer-rr-patch to route read only queries to a replica without any application changes, although there's some nuances, e.g. it might need some finessing if the app writes and then reads in two sessions, expecting to see the results from the write in the read.
I would prefer if lemmy.world and mastodon.world donations were NOT comingled.
I want to donate to lemmy.world but already contribute to my mastodon instance (sfba.social) as well as the mastodon project.
How to contribute? Do you have Patreon?
This is literally a Wikipedia moment for social media, thank you @Ruud
Thanks for all the work you put in @[email protected]
as one of the new people here, awesome!
Thanks, Ruud, I've chipped in re costs :) Keep up the good work.
Same thanks so much for doing this Ruud!
Thanks for accommodating us!
Thanks for the awesome work!
Cool, lemmy.world seems to be one of the busiest with lots of new users, we should be making it clear to new users that they can sign up with ANY lemmy instance and still access lemmy.world communities though. gotta keep the load spread out.
Is there any way to migrate an account? I signed up to lemmy.ml since it was the first one in the list and I didn't really understand the model initially.
No, or not yet. You don't lose that much by moving though
You lose all that sweet sweet karma!
I am using and typing on lemmy.ml right now. What I did to subscribe Lemmy.world is go to lemmy and use the search bar, copy and paste this ![email protected]
Exactly like me I'm on a regional instance and still subscribed here remotely I see so many people on reddit obsessing over what server to join that they end up joing no server and getting hung up on things like trying to understand what the fediverse is an activitypub is or they get confused about mastodon vs kabin vs lemmy and so forth the fediverse in general needs to get better at explaining things in normal people language so people don't just end up not joing
Yes that's true but it's also to be expected, as it's a different system and people take time to understand how things work. Go back 20 years ago and it was mostly youths on Facebook, the whole idea of it was just too complicated for most adults. Fast forward to the present day and...
Same here, the new community will be comprised of tech savy and people who like to try new things for a while.
True but i think they could explain things better for the less tech savvy people like instead of talking about email talk about language everyone that speaks English can talk to each other and different protocols are like different languages or like how instances are like bars you may have a bar you go to all the time but you can still visit other bars or call people in other bars from your bar
Sounds like Lemmy is quite power hungry. What are the specs of the new server? Can Lemmy be split into its services (e.g pictures on a different servers?)
When I saw you were an admin of a large mastodon server, I knew this Lemmy instance was in good hands. Well done!
More power! More power is good.
I don't know what most of that means but you guys (and/or gals!) fuckin rule and I appreciate the absolute hell out of you.
I hope more third party apps are made in the future for iOS
I'm not too familiar with Lemmy's codebase, but I am a devops engineer. Is the software written in any way to support horizontal scaling? If so, I'd be happy to consult/help to get the instance onto an autoscaling platform eventually.
The code is open source on GitHub and the backend is written in Rust.
I have no idea how it goes in terms of scaling…
Apparently it's not ideal at Horizontal scaling (that's what I've picked up from reading stuff here, could be wrong)
I think they can horizontally scale the Postgres maybe? Postgres is probably the biggest performance bottleneck.
Doesn’t support HA or horizontal scaling yet from what I read. Unsure if kbin does. Probably would have to add support for horizontal scaling to have that auto scaling do anything.
New here as well. The patreon link is for mastodon.world. Donating here is helpful for mastodon and Lenny.world?
Ruud is rad!!
Not sure if you know yet, but I was curious when this would happen and what it looks like when the server is down. Will we have a server maintenance message pop up when we try to go to lemmy.world or will some stuff show up but just nothing works until the move is finished?
What happens to accounts/history created here if the server shuts down?
He turns it back on?
Yea I’d definitely expect to see a whole bunch of stuff like that getting added now that we are seeing such a big influx of interest and people contributing to the project.
afaik everything disappears, but if it's synced with another instance maybe that content keep existing there? The accounts disappears for sure.
Thanks for all you do @[email protected]. You’re doing great!
It's Perfect Now. Thank u @Ruud You must be hero. 🦸🦸🏿🦸🏾♀️
Always give a long estimate so people are pleasantly surprised :)
"It'll be back in «checks watch» 5 weeks."
4 minutes later
"All good!"
Contributed to the OpenCollective link. Thanks for the efforts @Ruud and team!
Like everyone else here, I'm a reddit refugee but I'm quite excited for this instance
Unlimited POWAAAAAH!
Hello, i still doesn't quite grasp about the concept of federation and about how fediverse works.
But does it means that one instance can only run from one server?
Say lemmy.world running on Server A lemmy.ml running on Server B
User can register on whichever they want and can see the post from server A and Server B
But when Server A reach maximum capacity, can Server A scale up or distribute the load to multiple instances?
How can we solve the issue of computing power when more and more users migrate to using this services
Thank you 😀
Sorry if its a dumb question, but the whole Federation concept is still new to me. I created multiple account to log in to beehaw, mastodon, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml at first because i dont know that with one user, i can see other communities from another instances
Optimal would be if users would spread over many servers, instead of all coming to Lemmy.world. But most users don't fully understand the Federation concept so they think they need to register here so they can see local content?
I think the current server can handle a lot of users. It's just the software that isn't ready for it.. but that will improve. If ever this server gets too small, next step would be to scale using Kubernetes, but also that requires the software to be better prepared for that.
Perhaps having the lemmy main site suggest servers with less load in a dynamic way would help with this. Instance xyz is now recommended on the main page due to having less users. The main problem I see with that is that there are different "themed" and what is suggested may not match up with the user's preferences and tastes.
Thanks for setting up and managing the instances.
This is already the case I think. But the server must meet certain requirements, including specifically opting into being recommended.
Hello, after reading all the comments, I realized that I share the same questions (sort of) with the others.
Thank you for replying and clarify things
Cheers Ruud. And thank you 😊
It does matter where you call home though because beehaw just defederated and there was quite a lot of good content there.
You're seeing mostly CPU bottlenecks I assume?
What's your RAM and storage situation looking like?
I'm trying to figure out why I even saw this post! I've never been to lemmy.world - I'm logged in to (and currently browsing) sh.itjust.works. Not sure why it's showing me this post.
Gonna take a while to wrap my redditor brain around this stuff!
That's what we mean when we talk about federation!
All the instances are interconnected (unless they block each other). You can post, vote, comment, and even become a moderator of a community on any other instance.
In many ways, it's all one big site. In many ways it's also not, but to the end user who just wants to browse around, it's not as important as people make it out to be.
There's some rough edges around community discovery, cross-instance linking, etc. But the devs are working hard on fixing those issues.
I understood that I would see remote (is that the right word?) communities to which I had subscribed. Am I also seeing communities to which my local users have subscribed? I don't think I'd want that.
There's a few tabs at the top of the feed (on the site, apps might be different)
"Local" shows all content from communities on your instance.
"All" shows content from all communities on all instances that your instance has "discovered". Your instance will discover a remote community once at least one member of your instance searches for it and subscribes.
"Subscribed" shows content from communities you've subscribed to, both local and remote.
Thank you! That's tremendously helpful.
That's awesome! Wasn't even a long downtime
Quick question: when are these changes supposed to take place? ASAP or at a specific time?
@[email protected] I blame you for this!
Seems like you've suddenly got a weight to bare. You're clearly lifting it. 👍
Feels good to be part of the growth of a community!
That was fast! Great job! :)
Ooooh
Just joined. Thank you so much for your effort!
Is one donation method preferred over another? That is to say, is one cheaper than the other?
We prefer OpenCollective.
Can I ask you why? I've never used OpenCollective...
Less platform costs
I think some donation flare would be cool to have if you make a donation to an instance. It would help incentivize donations too.
Wow, we’re over 12k already
Nice!
Thank you again for your efforts! Making a donation right now to help with the costs.
thanks for everything you're doing man
Thank you.
The site is way more performant following the migration!
Thanks for the work you put into this server!
That's my admin!
Loving it here so far!
If you didn't tell I wouldn't even have noticed, awesome work!
Are you running this out of your home?
I have self hosted small things before, but I was always curious about lager stuff like this.
What are your internet speeds?
Check the updated post. It's running on a dedicated server hosted by Hetzner. Specs are high-end: "AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores “Rome” CPU and 128GB RAM."
Thanks for letting me know. I also have my work stuff on Hetzner. But I do not see "Hetzner" listed in this post.
Have you ever hosted on Vultr? I need a server with less latency and Vultr seems to have servers in a good location for my needs.
Ah you're right. The post only states the specs. The fact that it's hosted on Hetzner was mentioned in a comment (1, 2)
I personally have no experience with Vultr. Sorry!
Actually just had a short conversation with @[email protected] about the latency. We're going to try and address that for those of us outside of Europe.
Incredible. Thank you for your efforts on this!
Thank you for doing that! We appreciate having a place to come.
Great job!
What's the current setup, if you don't mind me asking?
My submissions still hang indefinitely, but when I reload they are there. I dunno if this is something connected to lemmy's code itself or the server but it's a bit broken
Damn, those server specs are crazy
Itd be cool to get donation flare!
Thanks for being so on top of all these changes! I’m enjoying my experience here so far.
Great news!!
Doing God's work here mate.
Thanks!
I just hope this doesn't cause ossies down the line. A lot of us are from reddit, and it wouldn't shock me if a lot of new users go back to reddit regardless of the outcome.
I'd hate for this situation to put unessecary financial strain on this service
I've found
shitpostingcommunity in Lemmy. I don't think I want to go back. 🤷Servers can also be downgraded. I'm thankful that Ruud is doing his best to accomodate this influx of users.
Thankyou for everything!
congrats
I don't understand why a dedicated server is a good idea, when the only true way to scale is to use like Kubernetes or Docker and ECS Containers with scale?
Your just gonna run into more problems, you cannot vertically scale forever.
I think the performance bottleneck isn't the web application, it's the PostgreSQL database of comments and posts that won't scale horizontally (easily).
True, but these are problems which have been solved. You use a cache in-front of the database and then use replicated instances of the databases with sharding and then use load balancing and connection pooling etc
I think we have different definitions of the word "easily" :D
"Lemmy, the Clustering release"
Thanks for you work on this! What is the planned time for the outage?
Thanks for all you do! I'm excited for the upgrades.
Thank you very much! 🥳
Thanks for all the work!
What is the service consumming most resources? Postgres, backend, frotend, nginx, pics?
What kind of server configuration are you guys running? A single instance?
Wow! So impressive!
Thanks for everything you're doing. I signed up for Patreon to contribute!
What is the ratio from the before and after migration server capacity? 1:3, maybe 1:5?
Around 1:8 I think, but not only more CPUs but also faster cpu.
Thanks for the answer! Looks like it's a pretty big upgrade then!
Godspeed, @[email protected]!
I'm very impressed with how smoothly that went, very well done!
OpenCollective link gives me "Unexpected error". Edit: got it now
Thank you. Feels super responsive.
On the other hand, posting on smaller instances is really fast now. Still kind of slow here.
Mo powa baby
Done and done. Thank you for your great support of the community!
Does it work on water now that it has MORE POWA?
Hey @Ruud! Love what you're doing with the instance. Do we know when the downtime will occur?
Awesome, thanks again for all of your work
@ruud I hope it all works well, how can I support the server?
@ruud Wow! 12k users since 1st of June , so in 12 days? That's pretty impressive!
Such good news! Posting is still super slow though.
For me it only takes like 2 seconds, it shows like it is loading but actually it gets uploaded faster
When I click post it sits and spins for some time and then it will show up. Not sure what the issues is.
For me it spins but I wait 3 seconds close evn if it is still loading and it is uploaded (I uploaded urls not images)
Anyone looking to host something big should check out bare metal hosting like Datapacket, Reliablesite, FDCServers, etc. Down side is total lack of handholding and other cloud features and the fact that you can't scale up without redeploying on a new box, but the upside is ridiculously cheap bandwidth. The bandwidth cost is by size of pipe, not gigabyte transferred, and pipes upwards of 10gbps are affordable.
OVH and Hetzner are also worth looking at but aren't quite as cheap bandwidth-wise.
The OpenCollective donation link is giving me an "Unexpected error".
Godspeed 🫡
Thank you for keeping up! You deserve the growth and activity.
What happens if millions of users migrate over?