Hello there!
It has been a while since our last update, but it’s about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.
So let’s go over some of these misconceptions together.
“Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse”.
While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network
The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don’t like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.
And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members.
“Lemmy.World should close down registrations”
Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what’s what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn’t even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.
Which brings us to the third point:
“Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that’s why the server is down all the time”
This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.
The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they’ll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very ‘expensive’ sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.
So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That’s one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.
“Why do they need another sysop who works for free”
Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.
We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.
While I appreciate that, the issues caused by lemmy.world to many other admins can be monumental. If the instance goes down, it causes many people to wonder why federation has stopped working, despite the fact the home server is fine. All that content in one place is not only against the point of federation, its a risk to the existence of lemmy if the owner just decided to walk away tomorrow. While im sure he wont, and im sure many users would try to recreate or move communities elsewhere if he did, a large core percentage of lemmy wouldnt come back, and that is the risk.
As I said, I sympathise with their technical issues, hell this instance has had hours of downtime because of SQL queries, but claiming they aren’t too big is not a valid response. Just because imbalanced instances happens elsewhere doesn’t mean it isn’t an issue here, especially because of the problems with the back end.
Their refusal to acknowledge the complete imbalance, or to do anything about it, is IMO an actual problem for lemmy.
Ps it’s OK to disagree with me, but I’d rather people explain why than just downvote. Can’t have a proper discussion with a downvote.
I made an account on lemmy.world because as I understand it you only see posts from communities on other instances if you or someone else on your instance has subscribed to them. So it seems like if you want the best lemmy experience you should join the largest instance, perhaps if that wasn’t the case more people would be willing to move to smaller instances.
This issue can be solved using this tool: https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
I don’t see how their number of users is a legitimate problem. If it was causing issues due to day-to-day usage causing problematic queries that would be one thing, but it’s been made clear that this is not a day-to-day issue with numbers, it’s an active attack issue that’s exploiting those heavy queries. It’s not like the number of users are causing a hug-of-death style DDOS by calling the aforementioned queries.
If the users are a problem, it’s only due to people being basically jealous of the user count on .world and picking it as the chief instance to fuck with, like picking the biggest guy in the jail lunchroom to prove you’re a badass.
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I downvoted your other post because while yes, in an ideal situation people migrating from Reddit would join local instances that fit their individual values the best, I don’t agree that forcing people to join other instances than .world is the right or that it will make Lemmy better.
It doesn’t matter if the reason is because they read about in a guide, it has most of the communities they liked, or even because it’s the biggest instance currently, people’s freedom of choice should be respected. How do you think complete newcomers would see Lemmy if even the most recommended instance turns them away? Probably that the whole thing is very exclusive.
The general sentiment around here seems to be that people like how the admins are handling things so far and that they feel inclined to be more active because there is enough users to generate discussions on smaller topics as well, so your claim that this instance is somehow damaging Lemmy’s image seems a bit disingenuous to be honest.