A reminder to move to smaller instances for a better experience
A reminder that this constant advice people blindly parrot to install and flock to smaller instance has now created something like 1000 new servers in 50 days that are poorly run and already going offline as quickly as they went online.
Github Issue 2910 is the kind of PostgreSQL problems that the developers ignored for months and people still defend the developer choices to have the code doing real-time counting of every single comment and post for numbers nobody needs to needs done in real-time.
PostgreSQL is voodoo to this project, they do everything they can to avoid going to [email protected] community and asking for help, learning 101 about how to fix their SQL TRIGGER logic like Github Issue 2910 spelled out June 4.
I know you are salty about how you are getting treated over at GitHub, but you should look at it objectively, Blaze is clearly advocating that people join top instances that’s not lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, not nobody instances that only have 1-2 users. They certainly aren’t going offline as quickly as they come online.
I know you are salty about how you are getting treated over at GitHub
No, it isn’t about my personal treatment. It’s about the cultist attitude you have towards Lemmy and the leaders without any ability to see what they are doing behind the scenes with the code. I know cults and religious faith is how many people enjoy the world.
A 2-line SQL TRIGGER removal takes about minutes to fix. It was crashing the entire site constantly. They sat by and asked for donations of money.
A 2-line SQL TRIGGER removal takes about minutes to fix.
Then go fix it and open a PR
Then go fix it and open a PR
Do you think I am the one who created the mistake or something? That I have access to the servers to install it?
It’s so odd to me that you respond this way, as if it was my coding mistake. It isn’t even me who opened issue, that is GitHub “makotech222” - is that your answer to them?
I don’t believe they’re insinuating that you were the one that created the mistake. Rather, that you seem to be knowledgeable of the specific problem and may be the one most capable of fixing it. The two line fix may be obvious to you, but may not to the main Lemmy devs. Until phriskey got involved, a lot of db tuning was being avoided (they’re responsible for most of the big db improvements this version).
a lot of db tuning was being avoided
and I did not understand or properly relate to that project culture. It had been that way for years and I should have “read the room” “go with the flow”.
No, it’s everything to do about your personal treatment, stop deceiving yourself. Just because you claim you have autism doesn’t immediately grant you the right to be entitled. You don’t get your way so you spam create multiple issues to call out the developers, and you expect people to believe it isn’t personal for you?
If you aren’t happy with the Lemmy developers, fork the project, run your own fork, convince others to use your fork. It’s a FOSS world, no one has to do what you say, even if you claim to be autistic.
Telling someone “you claim you have autism” is extremely ableist to all disabled people.
Just because you claim you have autism doesn’t immediately grant you the right to be entitled.
Entitled to what? free money? discount at the car wash? I see you like claiming things that I never said, who talked about deserving things or being entitled?
perhaps you do not grasp that autism impacts my writing and the level of pain I have in communicating, even this very comment. It causes me huge pain and suffering to have my brain touch the keyboard and compose English sentences.
Maybe you lack compassion for my suffering and you are a bully.
Entitled to what? free money? discount at the car wash? I see you like claiming things that I never said, who talked about deserving things or being entitled?
No, I never claimed that you said you were entitled. I claimed that you like using your autism as an excuse.
perhaps you do not grasp that autism impacts my writing and the level of pain I have in communicating, even this very comment. It causes me huge pain and suffering to have my brain touch the keyboard and compose English sentences.
See? Why make yourself suffer?
Maybe you lack compassion for my suffering and you are a bully.
Why do you deserve my compassion? You are literally hurting yourself by participating in discussions even when you claim, in your own words, “autism impacts my writing and the level of pain I have in communicating, even this very comment. It causes me huge pain and suffering to have my brain touch the keyboard and compose English sentences.”. If it hurts so much, get offline.
I claimed that you like using your autism as an excuse.
you used the word entitled, or are you confused? Now you are saying it is an excuse?
It’s a fact, it impacts my every word I’m typing on this keyboard, every single English word I speak, read, write, type, hear. It causes bullies and hate-filled people who hate human beings to flock to you to try to “correct” everything about your existence and behavior. Like you are doing.
Do you know the history of Autism in Nazi Europe where it started to get documented? Do you know how humans treat those with mental differences? Is it all your game to imply that love and kindness is shown towards those who speak and behave oddly?
If it hurts so much, get offline.
that is all you car about, not having to encounter words you disagree with, to drive off human person you don’t like. It’s sad to see the popularity of people like you, Donald Trump likes to harm others and gets big crowds too.
If you willingly hurt yourself, or your brain, conversing online, then you shouldn’t be using it as an excuse to get your point across. The advice was given, if it hurts, stop doing it, is that really that hard to explain?
convince others to use your fork.
Reddit convinced people to use Reddit. Elon Musk convinces people to stay on Twitter. Donald Trump convinces people to vote for him.
Just maybe the audience level of knowledge about the topics of media is the problem. You. Maybe you are actually attracted to Lemmy because it crashes, just like people flock to Donald Trump because he does bad things. And people flock to HDTV news instead of reading a book on a subject.
It’s odd but not unexpected that you think the problem is code and does not involve the audience being attracted to certain characteristics. I hear McDondl’s has a lot of customers.
What is a SQL trigger and why is it taking down servers? Do you know how to fix it?
I think 0.18.3 fixed some of it, but there are likely some more performance issues related to PostgreSQL lurking in Lemmy.
A TRIGGER in SQL is a logic that executes based on other activity.
Lemmy uses them so that when you create a new comment or post, it executes code to insert tracking record for votes and comments on a post. One of the things Lemmy does is called site_aggregates, and there was a bug where it was updating the counts for 1500 servers instead of just the one server. That got fixed in 0.18.3
Deleting accounts in lemmy was causes crashes. I’m not sure if that has been entirely resolved. These things are all kind of hidden in the background of the code, so a lot of developers overlooked that there were problems in them.
Isn’t there a logstream they could tap into to have a separate async tally going on instead of doing it synchronously? Probably a lot of things could be delegated to an async job performed when server load allows?
I’ve had to really adjust my thinking with this project. They want to do things a very particular way and it goes back 4 years, and a lot of the mistakes are just now getting noticed/attention. For example, comments were not deleting on all the servers, I was testing that after comparing server copies of the same communities and found they were not the same. It just didn’t seem to have a lot of people spot-checking it for mistakes. I am learn to just “go with the flow” and face that it’s more like how musicians would approach design and running a project. Media-focused systems can be that way.
Going with the flow is both ways. It’s a community project so everyone’s opinion matters, especially those who contribute PRs.
A reminder that this constant advice people blindly parrot to install and flock to smaller instance has now created something like 1000 new servers in 50 days that are poorly run and already going offline as quickly as they went online.
I am always advocating for any of the top 25 instances that are not Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml
For the rest of your post, I don’t know what that has to do with people aggreating on LW.
For the rest of your post, I don’t know what that has to do with people aggreating on LW.
aggregation refers to the lemmy database tables, site_ aggregates, community, person. The SQL TRIGGER logic lemmy_server uses that has been the source of so many crashes the past 60+ days.
Even if the SQL was top notch, it would not be a good thing for 50% of the active users to be on a simple instance. Just makes it easier to take down by any potential attacker.
Shit dude, you still going on about the GitHub issues?
You are really fucking stupid and it shows.
Shit dude, you still going on about the GitHub issues?
Is it your cult loyalty to the pro-China project leaders speaking? The authoritarianism that you honor? Do you have blind faith in machine code and are unable to see the level of effort they make to avoid the performance critical code in the application?
Did their words “high performance” on GitHub mesmerise you into believing it without actually installing the Rust code and looking at their performance your own self?
Sorry to tell you this, but you need to stop being overly obsessed over the Lemmy project. It is not healthy for you. Go do something better with your life. With the amount of enthusiasm you are showing, I bet you can find the cure for cancer.
This is the appropriate time and place to discuss the codebase and project management approach of the Lemmy FOSS project. If you don’t like hearing people you disagree with talk about those things, you should be going to do something else rather than rudely trying to make them shut up. Even from the perspective that you just want to challenge this user about the appropriateness of how they are expressing their opinions and frustrations, you are going too far and behaving inappropriately yourself with all the personal attacks. Just leave it alone and if they are saying things that you feel need to be addressed just report and move on.
If you don’t like hearing people you disagree with talk about those things, you should be going to do something else rather than rudely trying to make them shut up. Even from the perspective that you just want to challenge this user about the appropriateness of how they are expressing their opinions and frustrations,
I have nothing against anyone who wants to bring up issues, but the way one brings up the issues should be taken into account. Anyone who tries to get their point across by spamming GitHub issues automatically loses points in my book.
Is this acceptable in your book? Are you defending this action? It certainly is not acceptable in mine, and the reason why I called the user out on it.
I understand if you take offense at the way I came across the user in question, but when they repeatedly bring up their pain as a response, it is only logical that I ask them to refrain from actions that cause them pain. It’s one thing to have to go through pain for basic life-sustaining tasks, like eating, drinking, or even physiotherapy, but if your brain hurts typing on a social media forum, which you repeatedly refuse to cease, then you have no sympathy from me. Lemmy, or even Reddit for that matter is not a basic living requirement.
you are going too far and behaving inappropriately yourself with all the personal attacks.
What personal attacks?
Just leave it alone and if they are saying things that you feel need to be addressed just report and move on.
Likewise, if you have an issue with what I said, go ahead, report and move on. If I broke any instance rules, I’m sure the responsible admins will be swift in delivering the appropriate response.
I bet you can find the cure for cancer.
If the cure to cancer were found, like a virus to prevent deaths from COVID-19, sites like Twitter and Lemmy would spread lies and disinformation and tell people to avoid authentic facts and science.
Is it the pro-China stance of the developers that gives you blind faith in how their SQL TRIGGER code works or Rust logic?
Sorry to tell you this,
I doubt your sincerity and think this is a social tactic you use, lies. Insincerity.
It is not healthy for you
The lies coming out of Elon Musk’s Twitter and the lies from Cambridge Analtica on Facebook make me ill. The constant people I meet in the USA who praise oil consumption and deny climate change science makes me sick. I didn’t stubble into Lemmy because I was healthy with crowds of people who flock to anything in “meme format” and praise authoritarian politicians and businessmen.
Based on how humanity behaved during the pandemic, with all the denial of a virus that a microscope can deonstate as fact, I don’t think it is possible to be healthy unless you choose to self-deceive and believe the memes and advertisements.
If the cure to cancer were found, like a virus to prevent deaths from COVID-19, sites like Twitter and Lemmy would spread lies and disinformation and tell people to avoid authentic facts and science.
Maybe, maybe not. It’s up to the reader to differentiate between facts and tales. I don’t see how that is relevant.
Is it the pro-China stance of the developers that gives you blind faith in how their SQL TRIGGER code works or Rust logic?
No, I believe the project is in need of a lot of polish. However, the way you act, makes me hope the polish does not come from you.
I doubt your sincerity and think this is a social tactic you use, lies. Insincerity.
Okay.
The lies coming out of Elon Musk’s Twitter and the lies from Cambridge Analtica on Facebook make me ill. The constant people I meet in the USA who praise oil consumption and deny climate change science makes me sick. I didn’t stubble into Lemmy because I was healthy with crowds of people who flock to anything in “meme format” and praise authoritarian politicians and businessmen.
Have you considered turning off your computer, and looking out the window? Looks like the problems you are facing can be solved rather easily. There is neither Twitter nor Facebook out the window.
If the cure to cancer were found, like a virus to prevent deaths from COVID-19, sites like Twitter and Lemmy would spread lies and disinformation and tell people to avoid authentic facts and science.
They would try, but they would fail. COVID-19 is history now, because of vaccination, despite the best efforts of anti-vax death cultists to stop it.
The response to you being basically “Not small-small, just smaller,” is a great example of why people don’t want to leave established sites for this kinda fediverse nonsense.
“It doesn’t matter what instance you use!” Turns into, “Well, you chose the wrong instance,” when the one you went with went down for any reason. Maybe you chose one that was too big (or got too big after you chose it). Maybe you chose one that was too small. Maybe you chose one where the admin was just not committed to running it and gave up after some time. There’s a whole list of reasons why instances will have problems or fail or whatever.
Most people don’t want to play this game.
I mean having a bunch of new servers is not a problem. Just choose one that’s been up for a while and more stable.
But each additional row in site_aggregates table was causing the instability itself. The SQL code had major flaws. Adding more servers actually made Lemmy crash more.
A reminder that this constant advice people blindly parrot to install and flock to smaller instance has now created something like 1000 new servers in 50 days that are poorly run and already going offline as quickly as they went online.
And this will always… always be the biggest problem in the FOSS community.
“I dont like X, so I’m going to leave and make my own version of X”
So userbases get spread thin, manpower gets spread thin, developers get spread thin, and the user experiences degrades for everyone until it pushes them back to the bullshit websites and products.
This is exactly what federation is meant to solve: power in numbers without the centralization. Is that so hard to understand?
Sometimes I question why people not in favor of the decentralization are commenting on a Fediverse platform. Why not go to Tildes, Squabbles or another centralized alternative? There is plenty of fish in the sea.
This is another big problem in the FOSS
“If you dare offer valid criticism, then why are you even here? get out and go somewhere else!”
Your criticism is nonsensical. It’s literally criticizing the purpose of the project.
Oh dear, are you gonna start another tissue shortage with all these tears?
Pot calling the kettle black. I offer criticism of your criticism and you throw a hissy fit. Poor child.
Wooosh
Your answer didn’t justify lemmy.world being treated the same as Lemmy as a whole. It’s just a bunch of people who don’t understand federation.
The developers of Lemmy seem to make every effort they can to avoid using Lemmy itself to discuss their [email protected] learning 101. They have made massive mistakes in SQL TRIGGER logic that they avoided to such a degree that their social motives are in question now. Github Issue 2910 was opened June 4, almost a month before the Reddit API deadline, and they ignored it. Just like they hang out on Matrix Chat and don’t use Lemmy their own self to discuss code.
They have cultivated a kind of voodoo attitude towards PostgreSQL where people using Lemmy won’t actually scrutinize the Rust code or PostgreSQL tuning parameters.
For the rest of your post, I don’t know what that has to do with people aggreating on LW.
And, factually, the project leaders telling everyone to create 1000 new instances and shutting down sign-up on Lemmy.ml caused more performance problems.
They had a bug in their PostgreSQL TRIGGER logic where 1500 instances were updating + 1 comment and +1 post counting instead of WHERE site_id = 1, a single database row. So each new Lemmy server that went online made the table larger and crashes more frequent on lemmy.ml
The amount of disk writing by lemmy was ignored
They’ve neither told people to create 1000 new instances, nor have they closed signups on lemmy.ml.
Again, you should really stop revolving your entire life over one GitHub issue, and go touch grass.
nor have they closed signups on lemmy.ml.
You know what is easy to do, lie and make-up facts. It is so much easier to bullshit to be popular around here.
It’s disgusting the people who lie like you do and believe liars: https://lemmy.ml/post/2421636
The irony in you saying that, and posting second-hand recounts by other people. They aren’t closed. If they are closed, you wouldn’t even be able to submit a registration application.
Man reading this thread, you’re kind of a dumbass. Especially if you think rewording your answer here from the last reply to reframe to current time period vs what was being talked about would throw off the scent
They’ve not closed sign ups. Requiring approval of sign ups, is not closing sign ups. How am I wrong?
If they are closed, you wouldn’t even be able to submit a registration application.
Show me in the code. Because I have closed the registration on my Lemmy server, and it does not turn off the “Sign Up” link or HTML input fields. But you sure like lies and deception
Lemmy.one, my instance of choice, has been down since Thursday - just a reminder that smaller instance isn’t always the solution. Having a few solid account choices on multiple instances is the way to go.
It’s a bit frustrating though. If I didn’t know better about the fediverse, I would’ve thought Lemmy in general was down, with no heads up or somewhere to see what’s going on.
Lemmy One still down by the way
Does anyone know why?
I have a few for this reason. Is there, or perhaps will there be a way for subscriptions to the shared across accounts?
Maybe this is already I thing and I’m oblivious.
I haven’t had a chance to try it yet but here is this:
Lemmy.dbzer0.com is pretty stable, both in terms of release timing/server uptime, and also in terms of not flooding your feed with “politically instable” instances on both sides. Avoid the echo chambers.
That’s my favorite instance as well but I’m not sure what you mean by politically instable on both sides
One might argue that such a selection is, itself, an echo chamber.
You can also just have multiple accounts. I have one on lemm.ee just for this reason.
It’s funny, at this point I don’t feel like I even have a main account. I just randomly pick an instance every time I go Lemmying
Same, I have accounts on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and Kbin.social. I’m just waiting for a good app to be compatible with Kbin. Right now all the apps coming out are geared toward Lemmy.
I don’t remember Kbin having an API, so that might explain why
I’m trying to pick ones with meaningfully different aims so that I can try to keep some sort of separation in my head. Otherwise I’d quickly lose track of what conversation having where, with whom and why.
Yeah, I have .world where I first signed up. It occasionally had some issues so I added another that I just mostly read on if the other isn’t working
It’d be nice to export/import subscriptions but I’m sure eventually the servers will get past it
You can use that script https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
I’m afraid that as long as you have to go to github and run such scripts for these things, Lemmy will stay a nerd-only place.
Hopefully it gets integrated into the website at some point
Definitely!
Is there a readily available tool that can export/import community subs? I have two accounts on different instances but would like them to have to same subscriptions
I’ve not used it myself but heard good things about https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Awesome, thank you!
Does this work on android?
I don’t think so, you might be out of luck there.
I forgot that I had a lemmy.ee account and set up my own instance a few days ago while lemmy.world was down.
Right now it’s just a free Google cloud VM instance and a $3/year domain. It was super easy to set up with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy and I’ll never have an issue with going down. I’ll either be busy looking through Lemmy, or busy trying to figure out why it went down!
I learnt my lesson to have multiple accounts after vlemmy
That was my main. The instance vanished faster than cotton candy being held by a raccoon standing in a pond.
Oddly specific, but very accurate
Quoting myself from a previous post:
First of all, it’s really fine to stay on LW for now, no need to rush anything. But if at some point you have some time for this, then read the following.
So, to pick your instance, you can have a look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, filter by “1m” to see what are the most popular ones. As you can see, with a 27433 monthly users, Lemmy.world is by far the most popular, which is why you might experience some issues from time to time.
You should have a look at the next instances on the list. Short story: lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, lemmy.one, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com are solid choices.
You are looking at instances with quite a lot of people (the more people help with filling your “All” feed), just not the most populous one (lemmy.world), the original one (lemmy.ml), and instances that are too specific, either due to country or specific focus.
Long story:
spoiler
- lemmy.ml is the original insance, also quite crowded, not really the best choice
- lemm.ee can be nice, you can have a look at it and see how fast it is for you. The admin communicates a lot and is very helpful.
- sh.itjust.works had some rough time in the last few days. You might also not like the name, that’s okay.
- beehaw.org does not federate with the big instances, so if you go there, you will be in their own space. It can a valid choice, but please have a look at their guidelines first, they tend to moderate a lot. Can work for you, or not.
- feddit.de, lemmy.ca, discuss.tchncs.de, feddit.uk, aussie.zone are country specific instances, so probably not interesting to you if you are not from there
- lemmynsfw is a NSFW instance, probably not the one you want to move to
- programming.dev is an instance focused on programming
- lemmy.blahaj.zone is a pro queer instance
.
To migrate your settings (including subscriptions and blocked instances), you can use that script: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
LASIM author here, ironically on my own alt: Just an FYI that support for Lemmy 0.18.3 is not yet out, but keep an eye out for it soon (I have it working on a branch but I need to test it more before release).
This is the first breaking API change since it’s creation, so here are the limitations:
- Old version (0.1.2) will only support API 0.18.1 and 0.18.2
- New version (0.2.0) will only support 0.18.3 (and above until there are more breaking API changes)
- Profiles downloaded with 0.1.2 (and below) will automatically be converted to work with 0.2.0.
So that all means:
- You can use the old LASIM to migrate between 0.18.2 Lemmy instances
- You can use the new LASIM to migrate between 0.18.3 Lemmy instances
- You can use the old LASIM to download from an 0.18.2 instance then use the new LASIM to upload to a 0.18.3 instance
- You cannot use the new LASIN to download from a 0.18.3 instance and then the old LASIM to upload to a 0.18.2 instance (unless you are comfortable doing some manual work editing the JSON file so “old LASIM” understands it).
This will be true of every release with breaking API changes.
EDIT: PR is out. Once it builds, I’ll publish a new release! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/pull/21
EDIT 2: Release is published! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/releases/tag/v0.2.0
Thank you for the heads up! You might want to add that to the ReadMe on your Github
Removed “and above” from page and instead added a note to always get the latest version if your version isn’t listed as supported explicitly.
Great, thank you!
I think there is a huge misconception many people have that a larger instance is more likely to stay around, but due to the nonlinear costs involved in hosting fediverse instances this is not true.
Basically there is a sweet-spot around a few thousand (~2500) members where costs are low enough for a single admin paying things out of their own pocket long term is possible, but also enough members willing to occasionally donate or contribute otherwise to cover costs.
To be honest, I know it’s a controversial view, but I would almost like to see Ruud and the LW admins block registrations for a while, along with a communication “Have a look at those other instances, they are well managed, you can access all of Lemmy just as well from there”
I’m not looking forward to 5 years from now, where instances like this are the mastodon.social of federated reddit-likes. As much as they should block registrations, I don’t think they will. …but I have a hat on stand by, just in case I need to eat it.
I think they’re stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they’ve done their bit for a while, and that’s if they’re still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.
My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It’s a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn’t have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn’t mean it’s well configured or secure either.
I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.
Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.
Interesting, I wasn’t really thinking about this, I guess most of admins nowadays just prefer the convenience (including scalability) of a VPS.
I mean, with 27k monthly active users, they are more prevalent that Mastodon.social. The following instances are so much smaller it’s almost comical.
If anyone’s looking, my instance is open for everyone and I plan on supporting it long-term. https://lemmings.world
geddit.social is a another good server, I have alt there. It’s run by @[email protected] who has his own hosting company and also hosts mstdn.social.
Fwiw, sh.itjust.works is a horrible name, but a great instance lol.
What’s funny though, I’m getting beehaw posts in my all feed since yesterday. No idea if they’ve refederated with us, or if it’s an artifact of connect (my app of choice), or what,
There are 63 instances according to Jerboa.
Do note that this doesn’t actually account for an accurate total of Lemmy instances across the Fediverse. It is a hardcoded list of instances.
Edit: Correction, its a generated list of instances (that gets copied into Jerboa) that have a MAU amount of more than 50 as pointed out below.
That list gets generated based on the lemmy instances tracked by fediverse.observer site that have a monthly active user amount greater than 50.
Oh, okay. So how many are there?
My favorite way of discovering new communities / instances on Lemmy is through Lemmyverse and it shows 1,378 instances at the time of my writing!
I think 10 is enough for me.
@russjr08
That’s awesome thx!
@favrion @fediverseWow.
The DB migration at the end of this upgrade is significant, I was surprised how long it took when I upgraded my instance. Lots of room for things to go wrong considering the size of their DB.
That makes sense, especially how large the instance is. Just curious, how long did the migration take for you? Half an hour?
Took me the whole day. The new migrations require PostgreSQL version 15, and my Akkoma and Lemmy are using a shared database server of version 13. First shut down both services, then update Debian from 11 to 12, PostgreSQL from 13 to 15 and after all this, redeploy Lemmy to start the migrations. The new Lemmy queries use more RAM compared to the previous version, so the database was getting OOM and I needed to upgrade to a bigger instance.
Not fun, but everything works now and is stable.
Interesting, thanks
10-15 minutes here on a 32gb database.
It took about the same for me.
Interesting, thanks
Lemm.ee is amazing with a top admin
💯 checking out the admin of a Fediverse instance you want to join is a good idea. Do they communicate with their users? Do they seem responsible ? Do they have any previous experience as a network admin? Lemm.ee was an obvious yes on all counts.
The admin for vlemmy.net was the complete opposite and look how that turned out.
I said that in a support post on lemmy.world, and got accused of pushing an agenda 🙃
Sorry to hear that. Based on this thread, it seems to become more and more of a general agreement
Smaller instances are usually worse, in my experience
Of course I have one or two other accounts, but I personally like Lemmy.world. They serve as a necessary stress test that shows the devs and admins how to optimize further, and I just like learning admin practices at this scale of a userbase from a work perspective. Plus I don’t want to be on an instance so small they can’t or don’t know how to handle compliance stuff and evaporate if something like that comes up. Not saying I know how to handle all of those situations, that’s the job of someone else at work.
I think that’s one of the issues that the rest of the instances are facing to appear as trustful as LW. LW admins have a long established reputation and experience managing Fediverse services, and provide very good transparency and a large team.
Other instances are usually nowhere close to that (some will be in the future I hope). The question I usually raise when someone start promoting their instance is “how many admins do you have?´What happens if you run under a bus tomorrow (hopefully you’ll stay safe of course)? Is there a back up plan in place?”
Yeah, longevity and name recognition are why I went with sdf.org. They’ve been running many-user services for decades, even if the Lemmy service is pretty new.
ETA: they’ve been around since BBSes. I’m on a wicked nerdy old-school geek instance, and I love my local communities.
Yes, very good instance indeed
you should see how many of these big servers were (and still are) running their instances as ‘root’…
I specifically stopped trying to grow my instance to focus on security and sysadmin back-end administrative infrastructure.
The major issue I see with Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines, is that they both rely on a single server to be up and running to even work. Sure, you can cross-post to several communities at once, but that generates one different thread per community. Add to that the fact that to even start to implement a single distributed thread properly cross-posted to several communities, they must take into account that a given user or server may be defederated from one community but not another - should the user not receive the message if at least one server bans the user, or should the user be allowed to receive it if at least one server allows the user to receive it?
Horizontal scaling could be better, probably a long-term improvement to be considered
Just make a second account, the one I run, lemmy.myserv.one is so underutilized its a joke. Smaller instances like mine basically have to beg for users and the server goes unused while bigger instances struggle under the constant traffic.
Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don’t know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?
There’s no need to answer these questions. I’m not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.
(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the “all” feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)
Yes obviously the barrier to entry is high. But nobody knows for the big servers either since they are basically just small instances that happened to get big. Thats why lemmy.fmhy.ml just died one day due to domain seizure. End of the day all you can do is look at how long a server has been around and if it has be online a reasonable amount of time. That kind of reputation just increases slowly and nobody can make it happen faster.
I didn’t know about the fmhy domain being seized. That explains why I haven’t seen them around! That sucks. :(
As always, I have to ask: is there a second admin, what would happen to the instance if something happened to you tomorrow (which I really wish will not!)
The Vlemmy.net disaster is still fresh in people’s mind
Do we know what happened with vlemmy?
Not really, the guy just disappeared overnight
Ultimately I am the one paying the bill currently so if I die nobody elses credit card is being charged.
In terms of other admins, this is actually happening. Some smaller instances like mine are in the process of setting up a sharing admin work between instances so that if someone is on holiday, the instance still has an admin who can login. This was only just started and is in the process. We have to create a lot of documentation and basic stuff to get it fully functional where another admin can login and fix something. Its not at that stage yet and will be a couple more weeks before it is. We did a test last night where another instance admin (boulder.ly) could connect to my instance via ssh but without documentation on what to do and check anything more than the basics of rebooting or restarting something isnt going to happen. Eventually we will get it to what to do if site has a critical vulnerability or is being attacked but not ready yet. Its a work in progress unfortunately.
P
In terms of other admins, this is actually happening. S
That’s still very good news! Hopefully this can take away some of the worry users might have
I think without some kind of “incorporation” (or whatever the tech/FOSS equivalent of that is), most of these kinds of thing will be vulnerable to issues with the owner’s payment methods failing. Even with donation options available it’s almost always still being used to pay to the server owner in parallel to them paying server / domain costs out of pocket (and then reimbursing themselves with the donations)
That said, I have to assume there’s some way to set up some kind of automated payment option where community donations actually fill a fund that is used to pay costs directly in case the maintainer drops off the face of the earth.
It mostly depends on the legal framework of each countries. I know in Europe a lot of FOSS non-profits are registered as such, with legal status, even sometimes tax deduction for donations.
I guess that will come in the coming months for some.
Thank you, the word “non-profit” was completely eluding my brain while writing that.
Yeah I hope a lot of the larger or more serious instances will look into that going forward, very curious to see what the landscape of all this looks like in a few months.
If Mastodon can be any indication for the future, I’ve seen a lot of European non-profits launch their own Mastodon instances.
As I said elsewhere
There are certain things that are memory intensive and CPU intensive. If you have 10k on one server doing that it really adds up. However having them across a wide range of smaller servers, its not such a big deal.
As a user, you literally lose out on nothing not being on lemmy.world. You can partake in all the same conversations, communities and everything. In fact when lemmy.world is down, you can still see everything and when it comes back up, your posts will synchronize. There’s genuinely no upside to being on lemmy.world. That’s the way the system was designed.
Not sure people will listen though. I will always talk up the amazing admin I have on lemmy.tf, but it’s also worth mentioning that I have a bunch of communities hosted on other instances and each and every one of them is amazing.
I was on lemmy.world and had a really bad experience. The I moved to aussie.zone and its better than reddit. Never down, commenting, posts everything feels so fast and snappy.
This is why I love small instances as well. I’m on Lemmy.today and it flies.
People seem to be super worried about an instance disappearing for some reason. It has happened to like 3 instances, we are soon 1400 instances.
Also if it would happen, how hard is it to move to another and click subscribe on communities? Takes like 20 minutes if you have many of them.
I really think all this fear is silly. Enjoy Lemmy the way it was meant to be used. Use small instances.
While this thread has some interesting points in it, the majority of it is chaotic and confrontational. I’m closing this, as I believe we need to have a bit of a cooldown.
