2年前

Advice for now settled new Lemmy users.

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
CLI: https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Sauce: https://lemmy.eus/post/198402

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.

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.

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.
- 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

I'm not sure I understand. If I joined lemmy.world and subbed to stuff I like that has enough users to be interesting you're saying, unsubscribe from those and join a different one with less users? I don't know how that's supposed to work?
Or are you saying join a different sever, log in there, and then pull the content from lemmy.world? That somehow helps with the load?
- Lemmy is decentralized but completely connected together. I am on lemm.ee but I can still subscribe and comment to Lemmy.world or any number of other communities. The website you type in to visit Lemmy doesn't matter. All Lemmy instances go to the same place. OP is arguing that a large centralized instance is bad which I don't think anybody can disagree with. Lemmy.world has been down like every day. Tons of stability/DDOS issues but that only affects communities/users localized on that instance. Problem is that's like half of the active Lemmy users right now.
  
  Right but that doesn't answer my question, is he literally just suggesting people go somewhere else?

This goes for anyone in the fediverse, not just lemmy users. I am on kbin which may not have as much options as lemmy to migrate to, but I will also be looking out for instances that match my interests more.

I moved to a smaller instance today. One thing that I've noticed that isn't the same, is the Top All Time is showing different posts and vote counts on certain subs. I think I've noticed it only happens in the subs that I've interacted from the small instance for the first time. Or, if someone from my small instance interacted with it last week, there will be 7 days of history, but nothing beyond that. IDK if that's true or not, just what I've observed today.
I've subscribed to all the same communities as when I was on lemmy.world, but my feed seems slower and quieter.
- You are using lemmy.today, which as 12 monthly users based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list (the 1m column)
  I would suggest trying out lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works (both more that 2k users), sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com (600 users). The previous link is usually a good way to find an instance that is populated, but not too much (the obvious bad choice being Lemmy.world)

Same here. My main account is on lemmynsfw and it’s down atm :/

I mean, right now the main thing that would get me a better experience is seeing more activity, not less.
- You see the same activity on Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com that on Lemmy.world, with the additional benefit of higher uptime (less likely to get targeted as hackers want to take down the Lemmy.world)
  
  Not in All. The traffic in all is proportional to the number of subscribed communities of an instance, which is roughly proportional to the number of users.

Not an option for me yet. Especially after I found out some instances federate messages slowly. Like up to an hour late slowly.
- There isn't any significant delay in the top 10 instances: https://aftershock.lemmy.management/public/dashboards/oT7pdcoeHWccpvZCNmTpJKoGZND8ZdRO3wDWpMug?org_slug=default
  The only exception is dbzer0, but I guess they are upgrading at the moment
  
  That hasn't been my experience. Unless 18.3 recently changed the situation.
  
  But this post is about smaller instances. Not the top 10

And you can easily copy over all your subs/communities using Lasim, so the change to an account on a smaller instance is almost transparent.

I get irritated when browsing and a message is on another server and it asks me to log in again. Starting to make me mad.
- Im new, what do you mean by message being on another server? Do you mean a post?
  
  Suppose someone sent you a lemmy link like this: lemmy.example.com/post/12345.
  Now, you have an account on another instance called lemmy.test, also logged in and want to comment. But opening the original link lemmy.example.com/post/12345 still treats you as being unlogged, because it looks logins from lemmy.example.com, not lemmy.test or any other federated instances.
  The solution, for now, is to use the search* function from your instance (lemmy.test) by pasting the original link (lemmy.example.com/post/12345). That gives you a URL that's compatible with your login inside your own instance: lemmy.test/post/98765.
  You can do this (or rather, have to do this) with communities or user links too.
  I heard there are browser extensions doing this automatically, but haven't tried. Mobile apps should have better support.
  Edit: I remember being able to do this but now its not working. Perhaps something changed? I recommend using browser extensions or mobile apps that should take care of this automatically.
  Edit 2: I realized how to obtain the actual working link.
  
  Yes

I really want to see a data viz of whether/how much users are spreading out. Anyone got the data on user counts over time by instance?
- https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
  Use 1m column for monthly active users

I started on lemmy.world, then decided to learn self-hosting server infrastructure and made my own instance. Found a script that allows me to "auto-discover" all communities from given instance URLs, so I just added the instances that interest me. Boom, I have an instance with all of my favorite instances searchable and discoverable on "All".
For those interested in the script you can find it here. Do note that you should NOT use the default settings and make sure to use an instance whitelist, otherwise it'll pull every instance ever.

That's exactly what I thought when I signed up. Well not in those terms because I didn't know much vocabulary for it then. But in general I like underdogs, so I went with a smaller one. I have no idea how big any of them actually are, but I know the big 2, and a handful of other common ones.
- https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
  Use 1m column for monthly active users
  
  Don't see a 1m column, but the users count column gave me some context.

Can we make a thread of these smaller servers that are open to new registrations?
If I may start: I am running communick.news, which is one of the many Fediservice servers that I provide on Comunick. The first 250 registrations on communick.news server will be free forever, after that access will be only for paid customers. At the moment, there are ~30 slots taken.
To register, just sign-up and in the "application" question just let me know how you found out about the instance.

Given I haven't advertised it anywhere, I'll take this opportunity to shamelessly plug the open instance I run: leminal.space.
The default theme's a bit quirky, but you can change that in your settings if it's not your bag.
- Your theme looks great! Nice design chrisbit.
  
  Thanks. I can't take credit for the design though because it's using the vaporwave theme that comes with Lemmy as a base with some modifications.

too bad the ‘other’ lemmy world is spammed by communist propaganda
- lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works (both more that 2k users), sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com (600 users). None of them has any communist propaganda.
  https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
- The other lemmy world?
  
  @lemmy.ml
- Too bad this Lemmy.world gets spammed by rightwing propaganda.

Let's stop calling people "refugees" from social media sites. It detracts from actual refugees experiencing real existential issues.
- While i do see your point about not detracting from actual life changing issues, refugee literally means "one that flees" so people fleeing from reddit are refugees by definition. 🙂

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