Spread Out: How To Speed Up Lemmy

An export/import for "subscribed" communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.

Wouldn't this put me at risk of that smaller instance defederizing and removing everything I contribute while logged in to that instance?

I am planning on moving to lemmy.blahaj.zone soon-ish but I have 2 questions.

1. How do I move to another instance?

2. Can I move freely? For example, could I switch to lemmy.blahaj.zone to lemmy.world to kbin.social every day? I don;t like the idea of being "tied down" to an instance for a long time.

Yeah. This is all I see: Software: Lemmy Signups: no

As long as this tool includes people's personal instances, it's useless.

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.

Permanently Deleted

The only instance in my country has "cult" as the 1st word in its name.

Really good advice.

The more we decentralize, the less any one server needs to pull all the load.

I tried to migrate to another instance by rejoining the same communities as this account. However I can't seem to find some of the communities anymore through the other instance's search page. There's no indication that there's any defederation going on.

I still have no idea what a proper community joining process is. I just go to the search page, type it in and scroll through the random comments until I find a link to a community.

If only I could just copy the community link, right now it'll just open up with lemmy.world again, so I have to go through the other instance's search page. Please let me know if there's a guide of any kind.

Edit: Ok you need to manually type the URLs. E.g. if you wanted to open this community on lemmy.ml, type "lemmy.ml/c/fediverse@lemmy.world"

That's a kinda clunky experience ngl. How is the average normie going to feel about appending URLs in the address bar tho.

So can I just start running my only instance on my home server and just let only a few friends use it, then federate with the rest?

If someone's looking for an instance, feel free to use mine, lemmings.world. As a bonus, you can call yourself a lemming! It's hosted in Germany.

I started on lemmy.world but am currently writing this from discuss.online, a lemmy instance I found in the greater NYC area because that's where I'm based. It has the same access to all the communities and content that lemmy.world does and because it's nearby and has fewer users it's fast! Signing up and setting up my subscriptions only took a few minutes. I still have a lemmy.world account, but I don't need to use it all the time.

lemmy.world was an instance I tried and call me an impatient spoiled brat, but it's not usable for me because it's so darn slow. It's much better to join a smaller instance. It doesn't even have to be in the country you're connecting from. sh.itjust.works is in Canada, I am in Western Europe, it's snappy AF. And less toxic btw. kbin.social is pretty awesome, though. Loads up for me nice and fast with more content I want to see. I've settled on kbin as my place to go, but there are other instances that are just as fantastic. The lesson I learned: lemmy.world might be the big general instance and it might wish to claim to be "the front page of the internet" but it's bogged down and too slow. It also wasn't fun for me when I could actually use it. You know, because of the usual. Too much bickering and too much meta stuff. It's much better to join the communities hosted on lemmy.world from another faster instance. You get snappier loading up of content and you avoid their whole home page which, at the moment, is just a meta victim.

Something like this needs to be incorporated by devs at the UX onboarding level if you want success.

During mass migration times, you need to really hold new users hands to curate a path towards community ideals. Needs to be as easy as clicking boxes to attempt to create accounts on multiple instances and then app defaults to the local option to start, or something similar.

You'll only get a few crumbs here and there from dedicated people if it's that manual of a process.

I’m gonna guess that just being on a less busy server will make the biggest difference. I moved from lemmy world and lemm.ee is super fast even though I’m pretty sure both are across the ocean from me.

I think the concerns about smaller instances are valid (as I post from lemmus.org). Some additional data points to consider when evaluating an instance would be whether they're running a recent version and the uptime of the instance.

It'd probably be a good idea to have a page that promotes these smaller instances that 'score' well to help distribute some of the load.

I would prefer if there was a way to ping every instance to find the fastest one. Like this: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/issues/12

I've just discovered that kbin.social is near Wichita. Does that mean that ernest is John Rambo? 💪😎🤜

If you're in central Europe, feel free to join mine!

I don't understand personally why Lemmy.world isn't utilizing load balancing (specifically, horizontal load balancing). Is it due to budget concerns?

Wow, I did not expect there to be servers so close to me! Thanks for sharing this

In FL, the only one here with signups open is not responding and has 56k members. The next closest one is the only one open in Atlanta and it's exploding heads. No thanks. Wish I had more options.

I joined https://lemmy.myserv.one but I have to resubscribe to all my communities? How can you avoid this and have it automatic?

There are two things being discussed here. The first is the original suggestion of the account you'd log into and use as a server for pulling information. The other some have mentioned is the location of communities. They both share similar problems in an overloaded or defunct instance situation, but need different solutions.

For the account I think just one main thing needs developing, and that's the ability to share a profile across different logins. So you can have two or three different logins, but you have the same settings and when people interact with you they see you as the same umbrella/main account. I'm not sure how this could work outside Lemmy, like kbin or even Mastodon without being part of the protocol itself, but maybe that's a long range idea. There's also the problem of name collision since there's enough accounts now that duplication is probably a thing. The choice right now is limited to just making accounts in a few places and see if things are better/same/worse there before you get too invested with customizing your stuff.

For instances - I had seen a suggestion of having a grouping ability between different instances that wanted to share or mirror each others content, basically an automated cross-posting. This would allow multiple instances so if one has some problem, the content still exists. There's lots of caveats with that I'm sure, but one of the laments from many Redditors is the loss of resources, and that really should be a high priority to make sure that content is both preserved and available. For now the best we can do is make communities in a few places and cross-post the more important things so more people read and respond to it.

This is kinda neat. It would be awesome to be able to filter based on the attributes listed.

My local instance hasn't upgraded to 1.18, and it's 404-ing me when I tried to load this community in that instance. Another friction surface absent with this lemmy.world account of mine.