This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
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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
!gaming@beehaw.orgyou 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]
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.
This was really helpful, thank you!
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
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…
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.
No problem just make a pull request with your changes.
You probably don’t want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)
That said, I dig what y’all are doing, and I’m veteran experience / interaction designer who’s been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.
I’m more of a backender myself, but I think some UX mockup would go a long way in getting this improved.
There’s a website I highly recommend called fediverse observer, it doesn’t really go based on interest, but it has some other factors it uses and I really like it.
I think that there should be some meaningful way to “preview” aspects of one instance that may make it more attractive than another instance to a new user. I just joined lemmy.world today simply because it seemed the most generic. Onboarding process could use some work; https://lemmy.world/post/37906 is great at explaining it but people will only really see it for the first time once they join…
Also I have no clue if that second link works. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.
That’s how I wound up here too.
I’ll be honest. I only applied for this one but that was because I had (still have) no idea what I’m doing lol
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.
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 think they said they’re at the highest tier of their provider. May need to migrate to a different provider and get a beefier setup.
Do Lemmy instances not scale horizontally?
In theory, they can. But it depends on how it’s deployed.
From my cursory look at the deployment docs, Lemmy’s default deployment option is via docker. It relies on a postgreSQL server, which may or may not scale horizontally depending on the admin’s choice of implementation. For example, a deployment on AWS using Aurora would theoretically utilize auto-scaling.
I haven’t personally deployed an instance so, grain of salt.
EDIT: A good discussion about DB scaling here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3005
They do, but I’m not sure how well, I’m not a dev, and have no programming knowledge, so looking at the documentation looks like arcane hieroglyphs.
I’m pretty sure I read a comment about it from one of the devs, but can’t recall the fine details of the conversation.
If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don’t envy the sysadmins.
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?
AFAICT no. There is an open issue on the Lemmy GitHub repo. In general, all ActivityPub services I’ve used have this same account stratification problem.
I think this is key. Have the possibility to move an account to another instance or have it spread out somehow. This would also secure the account in case an instance dies for some reason.
@radarsat1 @nutomic I’m still working this out myself, but you can browse Lemmy on any account, and then comment from your mastodon account by searching the commenter (@radarsat1 in the search field did it for me), and then replying to them on mastodon. Pretty cool how it’s linked, plenty of opportunities to build apps that make interacting between servers easier.
I would appreciate this as well. Besides the flood of users issue, this server’s theme (Marxist-Leninist) doesn’t mesh with my politics. I created my account in the early days of Lemmy, so I have an extensive history that I am loath to sacrifice.
Wait isn’t lemmy.ml a general purpose server?
It is, but unlike elsewhere, ML folks are usually not banned or defederated here, only if they break rules (like insulting other users).
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.
Except (as far as I’m aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.
That’s actually a good idea
I like to call Lemmy “Feddit”.
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.
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’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 🎂
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.
Honestly the whole fediverse feels too fragmented for the average user, myself included. I chose lemmy.ml because I want to be where everyone else is. I’m not sure I entirely understand how this all works, but therein lies the problem for the average user.
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.)
It’s confusing even for me. Do I get to see every post in every instance? Do I get to see all the comments? Do others get to see all of my posts irrespective of their instance? Can I see and interact with all users irrespective of their instance? Can I browse Lemmy if my instance is overloaded? If not, can I seamlessly move to a different instance?
Do I get to see every post in every instance?
Do I get to see all the comments?
Do others get to see all of my posts irrespective of their instance?
Can I see and interact with all users irrespective of their instance?Yes
Can I browse Lemmy if my instance is overloaded?
You can browse, but you can only vote, post, and comment from your home instance.
If not, can I seamlessly move to a different instance?
Not as far as I know, but I’m very new to the fediverse as well. Your account is tied to your instance, but there is nothing preventing you from having accounts on multiple instances. You can even choose the same username! Usernames are
@username@instance.urlFor example, I’m
@Technoguyfication@kbin.social, but I also have a mastodon account@Technoguyfication@mastodon.social. I can browse Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc. from any of my accounts, but anything I post or comment will be from the account I’m using at the time.This was helpful. Thank you
Wait… So you can actually browse Lemmy from your Mastodon account?! So you can login?
No. You can’t login, but you can see posts from Mastodon. For example, when I made my previous comment, I got a notification on Mastodon that I was mentioned in this thread by my kbin account.
