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.
You must log in or register to comment.
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!
Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the “worse” parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!
how nice people seem here
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.
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
Can confirm I am not 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
that’s what I assumed, but was trying to understand all the downvotes
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?
deleted by creator
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.
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
To add to this, you can use exclamation point “!” To link people to communities in a way that won’t take them away from their home instance. Likewise you can use @ for users.
Example: [email protected] Or: @[email protected]
It even auto fills when you type
Edit: might be wrong about it linking universally.
This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.
I’m working on a Firefox extension to add a link going to your home instance.
for a while it will result in a lot of seemingly dead links as small communities will appear as 404s until the remote instance has synced.
Or at least that’s what i’m seeing occasionally when I try to copy/paste the communites onto my instances /c/ URL.
Making links agnostic is an open PR which will be implemented eventually.
right I was just testing it and it auto fills with absolute path using “!”. Using “@” I could only link local communities
This seems like a much better explanation for Lemmy compared to the email analogy everyone writes for non-tech savvy people.
Welp, tbh the dude is a pro at making a molehill out of a mountain
Is there a way to view C/Memes in all instances at once in aggregate? I don’t want to miss out on what other instances are doing.
Not yet, although there is ongoing discussion about this
I’m new here so I might not be asking the right question. As I understand it there are many subforums one on each instance with the same exact name. Are they all shown at once while browsing? Can they be?
I wasn’t talking about multiforums but that’s good to know too.
There can be multiple communities with the same name, that doesn’t mean there are. Like how [email protected] and [email protected] are the same “name” but a different domain.
So say for example you and your friend start up your own Lemmy instance and decide to make your own community called “Funny” where you can post jokes, without bothering to check if there was already a more popular “Funny” in someone else’s instance. There’s nothing stopping you and now there will be two communities called Funny, but one would be [email protected] and yours would be [email protected]
If your “Funny” gets to be really popular too, then other people might choose to subscribe to both Funny communities, and then posts from both would be in their feed. However they are distinctly seperate and you will continue to own and run yours and lemmy.world would own theirs.
Does that make sense? I know it’s a weird concept when you’re used to unique names in Reddit, but it’s not all that different from r/news and r/worldnews covering similar content but controlled by different people.
-
I hope not all people will go back to reddit as soon as the communities go public again.
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 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’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 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’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.
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.
Ya what are the limitations with scaling horizontally? Scaling up is a stop gap.
Ruud, thank you for your investment here though.
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.
King Ruud is good to us
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 ;-)
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.
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
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!!
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. :)
Umm I joined at 2k uses 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 :)
deleted by creator
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?
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).
I’m a newbie from Reddit too, but your understanding matches mine.
“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.
That’s right.
All hail ruud
/u/ruud(does that work?) Oh I have to make an actual link?Oh and fuck spez.
Agreed, fuck spez
Guess not. Anyone know how to tag users?
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.
