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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Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:
- Owning user accounts
- Exclusively host communities
- Serving local and remote users webpages and media
- Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable
Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.
I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.
I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.
While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There’s the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.
This is really the only way distributed has a chance to work but you won’t have much power as a server owner to ban users and be an edge Lord. Maybe the next things that comes up will be a true distributed network that also has incentives for people to spin-up new instances when needed.
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!
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
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?
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.
This is a great one! Might use it
Keep it simple with
lemmy.itjust.works.If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.
can’t wait for fedd.itjust.works to go online!
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!
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.
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
Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.
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.
What happens to the users of one instance when that instance is shut down or deleted? Searching for a url seems way too complicated. Can’t one subscribe to a server or sub category on a server?
This I would really want it to work but it’s much worse to me than forums even.
@nutomic@lemmy.ml It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.
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?
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Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.
After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.
EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.
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I think lemmy will be bitten in the ass by not having considered clustering/horizontal scaling from the start. Federation alone as a scaling mechanism is only feasible for “nerds”. But if the network wants to grow, we will need a few scale-able large hosted instances. And if their only choice is to scale vertically, there will be a hard limit (unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^).
Another downside of this design is: you can’t run it with high availability. If there’s only one process per instance, updating it will mean the whole instance is down. Sure, if all goes well this downtime is under a second. But if it doesn’t go well or if a migration is needed, this might quickly become hours.
Indeed. If a big instance like lemmy.ml was to be shut down all the communities would be lost. This is simply not sustainable. Why would users put effort building a community if it could be gone at any time?
That however would be a different problem. A horizontally scaled instance would be able to cope with more users, but if it shuts down for monetary, personal, or whatever reason, it’s still down.
Protecting a community from this is what the decentralized part is for. That is already in place.
(Although there is a middle ground where you could design the system in a way that one instance is mirrored and load-balanced across different hosters. That would actually also be quite interesting to have. But that’s another layer of complexity on top.)
@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.
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.
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 🎂
Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml
could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
If so, would you mind setting a “goalpost” for the community to help lift the financial burden?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!
there should also be a “subscribed” option that’ll show you posts from only the communities that you’ve subscribed to across all instances
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.
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.
