Now that smaller instances are disappearing, which instances do you think will stand the test of time?

Wu9fee@lemmy.ca to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 169 points –

I had an account on lemmy.one and now the instance has been down for a day or two so I made this new account. I also heard other small instances are dead or disappeared.

So which ones do you think will actually stick around for a long time?

ALSO, does anyone know how to get my subscriptions from lemmy.one and import it here? TIA!

135

Instances with

more than one admin
clear policies and active moderation
engaged user base
regular backups
no porn

...will stand a better chance than most.

No porn? Why?

.ca allows porn. You actually have to click "show NSFW" during sign up if you want to see it, so it's not on by default, and it's very easy to turn on/off if you want it.

I find that the instances that ban porn also ban a lot of other stuff that isn't bad. Feels like I'm in church and everything is being censored.

Surely keeping the csam out means someone on every nsfw instance needs to look at a whooole lotta porn, including sick stuff they really really don't want to see. For no pay. I can't see a way for that to last long so either an instance bans porn or stops moderating and gets defederated.

Sure, but isn't that something all of the instances will have to deal with, whether they allow nsfw content or not, I bet people will try to post it. And the trolls/sabouteurs will go for the sick shit.

Yeah, true, although it'll be a lot worse for the mods on nsfw instances where they need to make a judgement call about what crossed which line or not. That's 10x more difficult than just deleting everything that gets reported enough times.

I could see a better chance with one of the experienced porn Admins from Reddit, they have years of experience and are probably used to even worse shit!

NSFW and Porn are not the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_safe_for_work

The marked content may contain graphic violence, pornography, profanity, nudity, slurs or other potentially disturbing subject matter.

Square rectangle sort of thing, no?

All porn is NSFW. But not all NSFW stuff is porn.

Yeah, it’s a terrible term that needs to be done away with.

Exactly my point. Thank you.

I'm hopeful that the well moderated nsfw instances stick around so no 4chan-esque instances have a chance to replace them and metastasize past mass defederation

3 more...

Not to sound too pessimistic, but we live in a time where we see Twitter collapsing, despite being one of those "too big to fail" websites. My bet is that none will stand the test of time, the web is ephemeral (and archive.org is an underappreciated wonder of the world). I would rather say that what you really need is a backup routine.

On one hand, a Sonic hacking forum I've been a part of since before its current forum software has been running the same database since 2003, on the other hand I fully acknowledge that it's the exception and not the rule.

So have other forums. Maybe it’s just these newfangled social media websites that have longevity issues?

Because they crave more growth rather than prioritizing stability and being true to what they're purpose of existence is. These social media forum try to be everything and that is their downfall. Being focused on what you were built for and being damn good at it is the real key to a platform's long life.

I wish they stayed longer or given notice if they're disappearing.

Yes indeed, giving proper notice seems like minimal etiquette. Then again, life happens. Admin may be caught in some tragedy making maintaining their lemmy instance not exactly a priority, or they may even be dead.

There is not much you can do to just migrate your account somewhere else, that's a limitation of federation (compared to fully decentralized protocols, like Secure Scuttlebutt), but I'd wish Lemmy would implement ActivityPub's following endpoint, so we can easily build scripts to backup the communities we're in.

I guess instances run by SDF. They've been around since 1987 when they started with BBS. And since 1991 they are running the public access UNIX system. They also have Mastodon servers, Minecraft server and other stuff. These are their Lemmy instances:

lemmy.sdf.org - somewhere in US
lemmy.sdfeu.org - Falkenstein, Vogtland, Germany
lemmy.sdfjp.org - Tokyo, Japan
lemmy.sdfcn.org - Hong Kong
lemmy.sdfin.org - Mumbai, India

Don't think this is a strange phenomenon or that it's permanent. I've seen Mastodon (and Pleroma and Misskey etc) instances get born and die regularly. This is because it's easy to set up an instance but it's also easy to fall in an economic problem or just give up.

Not everyone is ready to set up their own instance; it requires dedication and resources.

The fediverse really needs some kind of universal login and a way to easily migrate accounts between instances.

Not so much migrate as be able to use it from anywhere and have it replicated. Same with communities.

Give things a unique ID, and access it from anywhere, even if the original server goes away.

This kind of thing may not be possible with current ActivityPub protocols, but there's always room for improvement.

The universal login is a very old suggestion but it'srealluy hard to pull off because that would have to be build into the core of the protocol. About the migration, that's a Lemmy issue, not a general Fediverse one

Not really; login mechanisms are a separate thing. OAuth already exists. You only need Fediverse software to accept OAuth from anywhere and to provide it to others.

The migration part is IMO harder, but not necessarily by much. I don't know of any fediverse software that'd allow it though.

What I mean with "universal login" is one account for multiple Fediverse services, I guess that wasn't clear from my post. Yea, proper migration is hard and questionable if we should even allow it (could cause all kinds of issues, espwcially regarding account security) but Mastodon allows you to move your followers and add a redirect which is the most important part of the account and Lemmy should probably try to do something similar with ranks and communities.

Out of the loop, what happened to Lemmy.one?

Seems to be down, I haven't heard any news but can no longer log in

Website seems to still exist, maybe they’re doing some involved equipment upgrade.

Some people are speculating a database error, because apparently 0.18.3 requires a database migration to work, here's the other post I just saw about this: https://lemdit.com/post/262746

I think probably this is it. Db upgrades are scary as hell.

how to get my subscriptions from lemmy.one and import it here?

Unfortunately there is no way to do that yet, but I remembered that there is an unofficial tool that let you transfer your subscriptions like you said

Edit: There isand open issue that might talking about it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985

I'll throw my tool out there as well: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

Unfortunately, you need access to the old server to download the list of communities and blocks - but that's true of all tools that do this.

https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate

Just used this the other day, worked like a charm (albeit a bit slow if I’m honest)

How do I install this on Windows? I don't know how to code. 😭

If you don't have an experience using the command line then it's a tad more involved then I can explain in-depth on mobile. Best I can do is give a brief outline.

To start with, wescode/lemmy_migrate is a python 3 script. If you are running windows install WSL (Ubuntu), once you have a command line I am familiar with you will want to download the repository from GitHub to a directory.

You will then need to create a config file called migrate.conf Use the sample provided in the repo under configuration. Edit it to use your information. You can use nano as a text editor.

Then it looks like the command would be something like:

python lemmy_migrate -c ./migrate.conf

Sorry if that is crap help, but I'm not near my computer right now, and don't often use Windows anymore to boot.

PS:

WSL is a program from Microsoft that gives you a mostly functional Linux command line within Windows. None of this is as complicated as it sounds, I'm using more words then strictly necessary to explain things somewhat at beginner level. The most time consuming part of this would be first installing WSL and then installing Ubuntu onto WSL. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do so.

Hopefully someone more familiar with Windows can tell you how to do the same thing from either the DOS prompt or from Windows PowerShell. It's doable, (almost anything is) I'm just not familiar enough with either to walk you through it.

It's confusing for me 😅 but I will try.

Just search for tutorials based on the key words from my post and you'll get there.

I am sorry for the RTFM post though. Been a rough day and haven't been able to get near a computer to do a better write up for you.

Here's a thread where I helped someone else with the process on windows: https://lemmy.sdf.org/comment/1420339

The steps are:

  1. Set up the python code
    1. Go to https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate/releases/tag/v1.1.0
    2. Download the zip file
    3. Extract the zip file, to make a folder somewhere on your system called lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. Remember where this folder is
    4. Inside the folder you will find a file called config.ini. Use notepad to edit the file to have your server URL and login credentials.
  2. Set up the python interpreter
    1. Install python from https://www.python.org/downloads/
    2. Open powershell
    3. install the python package requests by pasting the following command into powershell: py -m pip install --user requests
  3. Use the python interpreter to interpret your python

    1. first make sure powershell is looking at the correct folder. One way to do this is to open the lemmy_migrate-1.1.0 folder in windows explorer. right click on the box that shows you the path, and copy the text. then write cd in powershell. This path will very likely be something like C:\\Users\Wu9fee\Downloads\lemmy_migrate-1.1.0. If you don't want to copy and paste the path from explorer, you can just do cd Downloads then cd lemmy_migrate-1.1.0

    2. Finaly, you can run the python command with py lemmy-migrate.py -c config.ini

Let me know if you run into any problems.

If you can pull this off, you can officially say you know how to code.

Thanks for the tutorial! I might try but it looks hard. 🤔

Not too hard. Just alot of unfamiliar vocabulary. 😄 If you run into any questions with either of our walk throughs, (my linux one or @lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org 's Powershell one), feel free to DM me. Don't mind helping folks starting their exploration of computers. We all started somewhere.

It's not too bad, it seems more difficult because I added all the steps. Changing the folder PowerShell is looking at is easy to do, but hard to explain.

Seems like this would be a great feature for the myriad of Lemmy mobile apps.. nightly backups of your Lemmy account settings and a button to recreate it on a new instance

I plan to keep running this instance for a long time. As long as there are weebs here on Lemmy, I will give them a home lol

Btw, I also had a lemmy.one account. It was my first Lemmy account too. Hope they get back up and running.

how is it on finance side btw? is hosting this instance is bearable or is it burning a hole in your pocket?

also i noticed that our instance has 100% uptime. great work on that!

ALSO, does anyone know how to get my subscriptions from lemmy.one and import it here? TIA!

The other instance has to be up. If it's permanently down, there's nothing I can do.

  1. Login to https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.one/login
  2. Export your user in https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.one/settings
  3. Login to https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.ca/login
  4. Import your old user in https://natoboram.github.io/Leanish/lemmy.ca/settings
  5. Click on the big button

It will search for the subscribed communities, attempt to retrieve them and attempt to subscribe. Refresh the page between tries. Do not share your exported user; it contains your email.

Leanish is very much alpha and doesn't have all features. There's tons of missing features, many of them listed in the GitHub issues.

I have hosted a lot of my own services for a couple of years and plan to continue hosting my instance(endlesstalk.org) indefinitely, unless something very major happens.

As others have mentioned I think multiple admins and backups(hard to verify though) are a good sign, but its only indications and you can't really be sure, if a instance will be there forever. I think there needs to be an easy way to migrate accounts and then the instances going down hopefully gives a notice, so you can move your account.

Gonna be difficult to recover accounts from instance going down without a notice I think. You could regularly take a backup of your account, but that is tedious and you will still lose some data.

Can you upload your comment history to a new instance? Does that question even make sense? I’m not sure what backing up means, I guess. Just an archive?

There are tools that can backup and migrate communities, blocks and settings like lasim for a user. So you can migrate between instances.

As far as I know, there aren't any tools that can migrate comment history and I think anything that could do that, would need to be backed into lemmy itself(Which it isn't currently).

I'm running my own instance, JUST so I can be in control of my own Lemmy experience (and in control of my own archive of my Lemmy activity). I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

Yes, my instance was down for three days last week. I had trouble with an update and didn't have time to troubleshoot it. But I wanted my Lemmy so I DID get around to it and got it working again. And yeah... I never did get email working properly so when my ONE friend who's not me joined my instance I had to command line into the database and approve him manually. But so what?

And yeah, eventually the internet ecosystem may shift again, or I might get hit by a bus or who knows?

But if you WANT to join a tiny instance that's 99.999% (bus factor) not going anywhere for a while, I'd probably let you join mine.

How many GB is your filesystem/database as a single-user instance?

Not the person you ask, but as I'm in the same boat (finally got everything running except email lol), I use a scrap dell PC with a 8gen hexacore, 512GB SSD, 4TB HD & 8GB RAM on a 1Gb/~700Mb line 🤷 I'm aiming at an artsy/comics drawings server (hence some initial space) and I think I'll open it up for inscriptions when I have figured out the OVH mail config...

But it's a big step, today if it crams it's just impacting me.

Cheers!

I don't host my own instance but that sounds immensly overpowered for the job! Lemmy doesn't even host images and pure text, a database and web interface shouldn't be that hard to host

Yeah I know, I'll probably use it for other things too :-)

I have pictrs alongside Lemmy though, so I can share images in Lemmy.

Awesome, self-hosting for the win! :)

I’d like to say lemmy.world, but a lot of communities you’d think would be quite active are actually not so.

That's the thing about the fediverse, you need to be the change you want to see. Post a lot and contribute.

I will try and post something new every day to help keep new content flowing in. Can't expect everyone else to just keep us entertained. :)

You're right, it at the same time a small number of people trying to post regularly, regardless of whether they've got something that really needs posting, doesn't tend to provide high-quality content - and I fear that's what we're seeing a lot on Lemmy right now.

Yeah I have thought about that, but I think it's better to have a lot of content than no content. Of course the optimal would be if everyone posted quality content but maybe it's more important to just have new content now they Lemmy is growing.

I think if Lemmy becomes very big, there will be enough users that people who want a bit higher quality can just skip the meme communities and all that and opt for better quality communities.

Gotta give it time. Lemmy in general only took off like 6 weeks ago

Yeah I think this one will last forever. Everyone is on it and they have lots of supporters.

As long as lemmy remains popular there will be new servers/instances popping up. I found my start on lemmy quite rocky with servers vanishing sometimes with notice and then others just vanishing without notice, Anyway I quickly adapted and began to keep a list of communities I like to frequent while this list is still small I'm sure by the time it starts to become an issue there will be tools that make it a non issue.

I've started becoming more nomad in my use of lemmy compared to somewhere like reddit where I had just one account for eight years I just open a new account with the knowledge that it's not permanent it doesn't belong to me and there will be a time when I need to move on.

People often compare fediverse with email. But it is email as it was in 90x, not as it is now. Ant it was not that great that time, tbh.

Ideally, you need to select an instance which is already quite solid has enough users, has several admins and clear financing and which is not the most busy instance because we want decentralisation.

This is really an issue for kemmy as well as matrix - recommendations how to select a server contradict each other 🤔

Email in the 1990s and email in 2020s is the same if you're running your own MTA.

Sure. If you do everything yourself, like implement antispam, backup, maintenance, high availability, etc - then it is mostly the same.

HA for personal MTA is way overkill, just run a second instance with higher MX record value. Antispam is a given, backups are snapshots, maintenance is just system updates. Of course, you could just run an appliance which does it all for you. I'd say it's way easier than in 1990s.

my original comment was about using e-mail service provided by others. Hosting own e-mail server as well as a lemmy instance is ... not for "normal" people (as well as serving their cars or build a house etc)

Happily, I'm abnormal that way. I also dabble in PV DIY. Building houses from scratch, no. Servicing a modern car is also not worth it. Sadly, no open source EVs yet available.

Mine will, planning to support for quite some time. So if you're looking for a new one, join lemmings.world!

I'm pretty happy with kbin.social. It's a nice place, with several devs actively looking at making the experience better, it just takes a while being an open source project and all

No proper mobile support kills it for me

There's a mobile app in the works, Artemis. Things will be a bit better when the site gets official API support and more services can connect to it

I feel like most of the "country" oriented instances will last (and grow) as it is a more purposeful reason to exist, and this extends to instances with very clear themes as it also gives users more of a reason for people to join them.

I joined lemmy.ca but I'm not Canadian. There is no country instance for me. 😢

The law states that if you join .ca, you're legally Canadian. Congrats on your new citizenship!

What country do..I mean did you belong to before you became Canadian?

Somewhere in a little island in Asia 😉

Well, like many others here I self host a ton of services other than just Lemmy for a few years now, and my Lemmy instance isn't taking a significant portion of resources that would be needed elsewhere so I have no intention on my instance going down.

My instance isn't large enough to require multiple admins at the time, but I do have multiple friends in the IT space who I trust and could bring onboard should that change.

hopefully the one I'm on, lemm.ee

Also joined lemm.ee after lemmy.one went missing. Wish I’d made backups of the communities I was following but it’s going well so far.

Yeah really wish they had profile exports in Lemmy. But I also wish they let you create custom lists, like Reddit with the custom subreddit lists. I used that extensively.

Me too, I still miss browsing by category rather than a jumbled mix of a frontpage.

Firefish does have it in two forms (Lists and Antennas), but it's not an ideal interface for general browsing of a forum-style site like Lemmy.

I like it because it sounds cute. It also helps that the Estonia top level domain isn't as volatile as that of Mali's.

I plan to bounce around anyway. The fediverse is great.

Yeah but it's hard because my subscriptions are gone.

I regularly backup my subscriptions using the migration tools

This is one reason that I think many people should consider running their own single-user instance or tiny instances for close friends/family.

One of the problems with centralization is literally the fact that this can happen. The more small servers the fedi is comprised of, the stronger it is. There are also a huge number of benefits to this configuration on an individual level as well.

EDIT: Re: importing/exporting your old account is, unfortunately, a thing that cannot be done currently. I'm happy to be corrected on that, though.

I don't know how to code so I don't know how to run my own instance. 💀

If it's ever something you want to try, it's one of the easier servers to self host and there's a lot of helpful resources out there. There really isn't any coding involved outside of editing a few configuration files unless you want there to be.

Smaller ones? Lemmy.world did not let me log in today

Hopefully Lemmy.ca (one which we're both using). They're trying to become a not for profit company, plus theyre super transparent on server costs and how much money they have at the moment.

kbin.social is well funded and will probably be around for many years to come

where does it say well funded? the most salient thing I can see is

I have started each stage, but none is polished enough for me to honestly apply for a payout. I'll need to address this promptly.

Looks like they’re having database migration errors and possibly didn’t let them complete. They may have gotten scared after the upgrade and then downgraded. If they upgrade to the new version and just wait, they should be fine.

When I first launched mine, I had a couple issues and have learned quite a bit going through it. I say pay attention to who’s running whatever ones you’re looking at and you’ll have a pretty good idea on the longevity.

It’s true that several instances (the ones hosted in Mali?) closed, but I think you’re premature in saying the smaller instances are disappearing, Lemmy.one included.

Sure, they’re bound to crash or go down for maintenance from time to time, but that doesn’t mean they’re finished. So far my experience has been that if you give it a couple days they’ll be back. Keep in mind these are shoestring operations and sometimes seeing major influxes of users.

I don't know. My friend was in another instance and he said it's gone now and went back to Reddit.

My interests line up pretty well with my admin. I think that the instance should be pretty reliable as long as I want to keep using Lemmy.

I kinda hope transferring data between two accounts on two different instances is easy. I don't really want a fresh start for the 13th time (this happened years ago outside of the fediverse, mostly thanks to forgetting my password).

I think mine will last for quite a while. Lemmy hogs so little resources, so long as I have my VPS it'll be up and running. Object storage is a potential in the future, but I am hopeful lemmy optimizes its image databasing as well. I am hopeful as lemmy grows my instance will grow as well as I feel there is a demand for a book/writing focused instance, but we will see. I'm gonna be here regardless.

No one really knows but I'd imagine the bigger ones the you see now like world ml kbin and others would stick around.

Lenny.ca, hopefully. 🤞

I don’t want to figure everything out again.