Megathread for Reddit Blackouts and News - Day 2

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Technology@beehaw.org – 167 points –

hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!

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Does anyone know what's going on with Lemmy.ml? I can't access it and keep getting 502 errors when I try to check it on browser. Hopefully they're just working on their server because that was the instance where I had subscribed to stuff. It won't be a big deal if they're just gone, just an inconvenience.

If they are gone, already, it is somewhat worrying for the viability of Lemmy generally, because I don't want to lose my subscriptions and comments every time a server shuts down. I've made an account on beehaw and lemmy.world as well under the same username, and I probably will make ones under other popular instances just in case.

Does anyone know what’s going on with Lemmy.ml?

Serious scaling problems with the database in Lemmy. The code was not really tested and tuned for the quantity of federation peers to replicate with, comments, votes, postings. A lot of big communities over there to replicate.

I'm seeing pending on all my remote Join to communities hosted there.

Not sure, but I'm getting the same thing when trying to connect directly. I'm guessing they got the hug of death. It's the second day of the blackout on Reddit, this is probably the time of critical mass for people that are migrating. My assumption is they all tried to join that main lemmy.ml instance rather than distributing the load across smaller instances.

All of the most popular lemmy instances have been having issues while they deal with the massive user growth. I expect it will get better over time as things get figured out and lemmy devs make improvements. I don't know what's wrong with lemmy.ml specifically but it will probably be back online soon, I think one of the main lemmy devs runs it so it's not like they are going to abandon it now that lemmy is taking off.

I’ve made an account on beehaw and lemmy.world as well under the same username, and I probably will make ones under other popular instances just in case.

Probably a better choice is UNpopular instances. Smaller ones. People who don’t quite grasp the federation concept are flooding in from Reddit, joining the larger instances out of FOMO, and overwhelming them.

I joined two days ago, a very small instance simply because I liked the name. And I read recommendations that the choice would not matter, that you can switch later anyways and whatnot.

Turns out, bad choice. Many communities are invisible to me unless I perform some exclamation mark shenanigans which I still don't understand (or another person from my instance does, but since we are so few, that doesn't happen so often).

Links to other instances are broken. For example, when yesterday's megathread was closed due to 500 comments, the mod left a link there to this thread here, I suppose. Because since I'm not from beehaw, the link does not work for me.

So it really comes with convenience and benefits to be part of a big instance, as long as that instance can handle the load. It should not make a difference, but it does. I wish the communication was clearer about that upfront. I'm a nerd and can handle it (for a while), but surely some people would leave again, when experience does not live up to advertisement.

For the best experience, join the instance with the most content you're interested in. Federation is nice in theory, but we're not fully there yet.

The person I was replying to was concerned about having a back-up account that would be on an instance that wouldn’t be down. Several of the larger instances have had down-times as they’ve struggled to handle the overload, as the commenter found to their dismay.

Putting their back-up account on one of the smaller instances rather than one of the popular ones would give that person the stability they are seeking.