Whether you are a Reddit refugee (I am one) or just randomly stumbled upon Lemmy and decided to join lemmy.world, welcome to the Fediverse.
If you have been here for long enough and settled in and now finally feel comfortable with Lemmy, I highly advice you to move to smaller instances. I just newly left Lemmy.world to join Lemm.ee.
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance. This will benefit the admins of Lemmy.world a lot as they would not have to deal with such a high amount of users. It also leaves room for new users to join and have a good experience rather than an experience filled with server outages where they will give up on Lemmy.
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There are these instance migration tools you can use to get things over to your new account.
GUI: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.
Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.
Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.
It would still be better to have multiple “large” servers, instead of only one or two, which is currently the case. I really don’t think that it is a good thing to have a big difference between the biggest and the next biggest servers, as it effectively centralizes the content around the biggest instance.
I however agree that it doesn’t make sense to have tons of tiny instances.
I keep saying that the US needs to have its own big instance (or several) to host all those communities about US cities and sports teams that nobody else needs to care about, as well as potentially a good chunk of users and to exist as a large server alternative to lw.
People who see it this way are likely not from the US.
People who could make it happen must be from the US.
:-/
Everyone is welcome to join my small instance at endlesstalk.org. I have also setup the same alternative UI’s as lemmy.world, if that rocks your boat!.
Thank you for sharing this! It seems that you are the only admin of your instance, do you plan to have a back up person?
It is on my to-do list, but it would take some work to add support for multiple people to have access to everything required and I would also need a lot more documentation, than I currently have.
That’s all good, you can take your time! I was just asking because usually that’s a deal breaker for potential joiners to see a one-person admin team
It is a good point but are people really joining lemmy.world en mass still and if so why don’t the admins close registrations?
That is a good point. Currently things have stabilized. But you never know what might cause another mass migration to Lemmy in the future, which will lead to every new account joining Lemmy.world.
don’t see the benefit tbh. software will scale, or not, if not people will leave for others
Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!
Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.
Hello fellow self hoster!
Did you get email to work :-D ?
What’s your hardware?
Cheers!
Hello there!
I’m running Lemmy via Lemmy-easy-deploy on Hetzner (so self-hosted as in: via a provider). E-mail is working via smtp2go and is indeed active :)
One problem I foresee with smaller instances is discovery. As we know, if someone creates a new community somewhere else, your instance will onlyrecognise it once someone searches for it.
On a large instance like lemmy.world, there’s a good chance that someone else did, and you can stumble upon it by browsing /all. On a smaller instance this may not happen unless it’s set up to discover and thus mirror every community everywhere.
That’s why I populated /all with Lemmy Subscriber Bot
Interesting!
There’s a script for instance operators to run to fix that but I don’t have the link on me
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance
But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.
If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.
But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.
But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.
You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.
Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won’t appear in everyone’s feed until I subscribe to it?
They don’t have to subscribe, but somebody has to have searched specifically for that community, so kinda yes.
People here promote scripts and bots so that an instance gets automatically subbed to new communities - which ok, but then which small instances really want to mirror the whole Fediverse? Most will run out of hard drive space, and we’re back at square one.
There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.
Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.
That’s a good argument for bigger instances, but not one for using the largest one. Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works have more that 2k members, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com have 600 members, based on your argument their expected life expectantly is as long as Lemmy.world
Good advice or also just host your own instance will be a great way and its very simple to do that I feel anyone with some technical knowledge can do it by using Yunohost.
- Buy a domain using namecheap or cloudfare.
- Rent a VPS on Linode, Vultr , Digital Ocean or Hetzner
- Install Yunohost from the official website and be sure to install Debian 11 and not Ubuntu thats the one recommended by Yunohost developers.
- Once Yunohost is installed , set it up , add your domain , add a DNS record to point to the the server public IP.
- Now just installed Lemmy app from the Yunohost app store and thats it now you have your own lemmy instance.
We got almost 20,000 instances I don’t think we need to push people to self hosting unless that’s something they specifically enjoy.
No its 1376 instances and about 28000+ communities I believe.
Thanks for correcting me. I must have gotten confused between the Instances and communities.
wasn’t yunohost using an older version of Lemmy?
Its not always on the latest but its being really stable for me. I think they tested really throughly so thats why the updates are delayed but it just works.
My steps were:
- Sign up for free Google cloud VM instance
- Buy a $3 domain name from Cloudflare
- Install with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
- Change Cloudflare to “Strict”
- Log in
What is a $3 domain? I really wanted to buy one like that cheap. Why change cloudfare to strict?
Honestly, I don’t even know. It was in the advanced settings on Lemmy-Easy-Deploy and I missed it and spent like 2 hours troubleshooting until I saw that, lol.
.win is a $3 domains on Cloudflare and shouldn’t have issues of being revoked (like .ml is going through and others could potentially face).
Oh yeah I just read about cloudfare strict but I think thats only if you proxied the request through cloudfare servers , if you just point the domain to the server I dont think you need to do that.
I bought the domain through Cloudflare and when setting the CNAME and A records it automatically proxied them so I didn’t even think about it at the time.
Yeah that is how it usually works. Well thank you for the info its been really helpful
Thanks for this! I just picked up a RPi4 and have been kicking it around trying to host a few applications and I’m just about to re-flash and start fresh. I’ll give Yunohost a shot tonight!
I joined a local instance of mastodonte. I had days without being able to access my stuff, and finally recreated an account on the main mastodonte instance. So this time I directly picked a large instance.
I had similar issues, I joined a small Mastodon instance and for some reason couldn’t see comments or amounts of boosts. I guess it was just misconfigured
Just created my account on sopuli.xyz before I realised I could migrate the whole account from Lemmy.world but have had zero downtime since then so that’s a positive.
It is the strength and the weakness of it all.
On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.
Lemmy.world’s issues at present are due to DDOS attacks, not high user count
And joining another instance is a great way to continue browsing through those attacks.
Thanks for making this post, I feel like it can’t be repeated enough. People sit on Lemmy.world instead of creating an account somewhere else where they can literally read and comment on previous posts from Lemmy.world, and then it all gets synked when it’s up again.
It’s like email guys - the entire global email system doesn’t stop because your company email server has technical issues.
What about the instances I created on Lemmy.world? Will I be able to moderate them from other instances?
You mean communities?
I’ve created the communities on Lemmy.world already, can I add moderation permissions to another account on another instance or am I required to moderate Lemmy.world communities/forums on Lemmy.world?
you can mod users from other instances
So that means I can add moderator permissions to users on other instances?
Yes
