Are you not annoyed by Lemmy's constant glitches?
On the instance I'm using, my comments and posts have disappeared. It is ok?
I had a few helpful comments here that I saved, but it's all gone.
Having got used to the stability in Mastodon I was surprised by such things in Lemmy as:
Unable to log into your account through the app after an update on the server.
Unable to log into your account through the app if your instance version is out of date.
Just because you've created a post or written a comment doesn't mean other Lemmy users will see it.
I have to constantly check to see if my messages are visible on other instances.
You also need to have many sub-accounts on different instances in case some of the primary instances are unavailable.
I have wildly more patience for Lemmy's glitches than I do for Reddit's. Lemmy's devs are working on a shoestring budget with just a few people trying to prop up a whole social network. The project is still pretty early in its life cycle.
A lot of the mentioned issues are caused by instances having different versions.
This could be fixed with API versioning. As in you support the last couple versions of the API rather than only the new one.
I believe this most recent update to v0.19 was somewhat unique in the regard of login incompatibility across versions, as major breaking changes to authentication itself were the focus of it.
Yeah but take into account nobody was expecting reddit enshitificate so fast.
Before we get the massive exodus things were smooth.
Yeah I'm sure it revealed a lot of scaling issues and other bugs.
It's often considered bad practise to prematurely optimize software. But when working at scale little things can start to really bite.
Exactly. Those people are paid salaries. They have teams working on things. When something is allowed to go wrong, someone either didn’t do the job they’re paid for, or they’re incompetent/apathetic. They’re using proven software that’s been around a while.
When there’s a problem with a Lemmy instance, then maybe the one person responsible was at the job that actually pays their rent. They’re working with beta software that’s full of “surprises”.
Since your reply to the post for xarexyouxmadx is not visible from this instance, I will reply here.
Has this problem gone unresolved for a long time?
Right now, a similar issue with the instance lemmy.today
The first instance I was registered on doesn't exist anymore either. It was celeb.pizza
As a developer, I am absolutely amazed that any of this (all the software you are using, all of it) even works a little. So: no.
I independently came up with "federation" (as in thought of it but not exactly this, and was building on others work) as the basis for a masters thesis in the early 2000s but left the program to get a job so never saw it through.
So, no, I am not annoyed. I am amazed, grateful, impressed, and humbled but I am not annoyed.
Great take. Everything in the software world is held together with twine. It's a miracle that anything works. That's the only kind of miracle or magic that I believe in. As someone on a mailing list once said about networking, "it's two cans and some string."
Seems super stable to me, might be the client smoothing it out.
Could also be issues with their particular instance - particularly the "instance out of date" one.
Which is?
Yea I haven't noticed much
Boost for Lemmy & web app
The 0.19 update was special since it modified the auth stuff. But a quick log out and in was all I needed.
The comments not appearing on other instances is a fair point, but I imagine something similar happens on Mastodon as well
I've made the assessment that the growing pains are worth weathering, because Lemmy as a platform and wider community gives me much more joy than any big corpo platform I've ever tried.
I’ve not seen a single one of those glitches since I’ve been an active user.
Neither have I. Been using Sync and it's pretty flawless
Voyager here.
Nope, even a buggy, glitchy Lemmy is a head and shoulders better experience than any shitty corpo social media.
I think many of us feel that way. Just getting away from that shit is worth a lot of smaller glitches here on Lemmy. :)
I'm on Lemmy.world & using the eternity app I haven't had any real issues yet but it's only been about 2 months for me since I started using this platform.
We at SDF had some outgoing federation issues recently, and we weren't the only ones. I.e., I'd post or comment something and check from any other instance, and it was like I never posted/commented at all. Fortunately, it seems to have gotten fixed over Christmas Eve.
Also, my original instance (vlemmy) literally deleted itself in July.
Man, what sort of psycho does a release on Xmas eve. I try and avoid doing at after 3pm haha
I'm on lemm.ee with eternity app also
I'm willing to put up with Lemmy's glitches. The vast majority of admins, mods, and developers are volunteers doing what they do (largely for free) simply because they think it's worth doing. If it were a product I paid for I would not be near as chill about it.
Lemmy was a fairly young project when everyone started piling in from Reddit. If the glitches you're experiencing bother you that badly, perhaps consider contributing to the project, the network or your homeserver. Open source projects work best when everyone contributes what they can, when they can and as they can.
Personally, every bug I've encountered has been because of my lemmy mobile client and not lemmy itself. This is remarkable to me, I work in QA and was expecting a lot more bugs when I joined
no.
its ver 0.19, how can you hold something so obviously in development to such standards?
Not really.
If it was commercial software, I'd assume that some dick project manager forced a premature release. Fuck that guy.
Since it isn't, I just assume it's really hard to get everything right first try without a big QA team.
Ya sometimes my posts magically are deleted or hidden or pictures don't upload. But still a great experience for me due to the wholesomeness.
And it's awesome that you can use pictures in comments.
tbf reddit also allows that with markdown
It does? I was on there since digg and never seen that.
people don't use it for some reason ¯_(ツ)_/¯
all third party clients display markdown images fully inline, all official clients either require a click or show a small thumbnail
Was reading comments through the RaccoonForLemmy app and your comment looked like this:
Screenshot
After a while, the app froze and closed by itself. However, after I reopened the app everything looked normal.
That's a known bug which has been partially solved in the latest development build, have a look here. There were issues with markdown rendering when there were both text and images.
Wut
a little, but I’m dealing with it. 18 or so years ago, when reddit was new, it had a lot of bugs, was unstable, and would often go down for upgrades and maintenance.
although lemmy has been around for a few years, it hasn’t really been run or even tested as a serious platform until last summer when tens of thousands of new users flocked to it suddenly from reddit and both a bunch of new instances popped up and a bunch of new and rapid software releases brought a bunch of new features to handle the sudden growth. some growing pains are to be expected and, frankly, it’s all gone far more smoothly than I expected it would.
18 Years ago I was more patient with things like that. Today my patience is only for shit that matters.
aaaaand why don’t you think that taking the time to work out the bugs on this platform matters?
you do realize that this - all of this here that we’re participating in - is part of a big experiment run purely on volunteer work by a community-driven effort, and is entirely funded thereby. there’s no corporate effort at play here and no megabucks to bankroll it. that’s kinda the point of it all. so, if you’re dissatisfied with that state of things or by what you perceive as a lack of progress, I suggest you roll up your sleeves and dig in, contribute your time and effort to the development, or find some other way to contribute to the project and/or community in furtherance of its goals.
whining here about those things will get you precisely nowhere— especially when you either imply or outright declare that any of this doesn’t matter— or the idea that you’re entitled to something for nothing.
My family matters. My work matters. My pleasure activities matter. Whether or not some rando on the Internet is able to read my comment really doesn’t matter.
nobody here doubts that you’re selfish and self-centered with no care for anyone but yourself.
then why are you here trying so hard?
You’re calling me selfish for caring about my family, work, and real life things instead of the Internet? That’s just sad man.
What’s sad is that you have to twist my words to excuse your behavior.
And if you really didn’t care, you wouldn’t have been spending the last couple of days trying so hard to convince me.
I’ve said very little, you seem like the one trying to convince yourself. 🤷♂️
an argument right out of kindergarten.
again, if you don’t care, why have you spent 2 days trying so hard to convince me?
🤷♂️
I'm self-hosting and it has been ridiculously smooth coupled with Voyager as my mobile app. Now I understand that a single user instance is a lot easier to handle than a multi-user one so I naturally don't have any experience or opinion on how Lemmy instances scale with users in terms of stability.
Right now, another bug has manifested itself. Your message is shown in the "Replies" tab in Jerboa's inbox, but it is not visible in the comments of the message thread.
For a few months, I couldn't log into this instance through apps.
Yesterday, the lemmy.today instance stopped sending posts and messages to the Lemmy network. I only found out about it when I logged in through another instance in asklemmy and saw that my post wasn't in the community.
This happened to me when my language settings weren't set. You can't even access them in jerboa, log in with a browser and check if English is selected besides default. And whatever else you wish to see.
You also need to make sure undetermined is checked
Don't know what you're talking about
The app? There are many, many clients for Lemmy. Thunder is able to handle multiple versions and multiple accounts on multiple instances. This is a client API implementation limitation of whatever client you are using. Not Lemmy itself.
As for the federation issues, they are being worked out. Each major version has improved the internal server logic, improving the reliability of the inter-instance communication. But the changes have also come with kinks, that have had to be worked out with each sub-version update, before the team bites off on the next big improvement.
v19 introduced changes to how the federation queue works, and these are currently causing higher resource usage than before. Because of this, some instances seem to be falling behind on syncing federated content.
When do you think Lemmy will reach the same stability as Mastodon?
With the current tiny team, at least a year out. Probably more.
With improved functionality, adoption will likely improve, with improved adoption interest in developing it should improve... Once that feedback loop gets going things can go very fast.
The reddit migration has seeded Lemmy with a bunch of competent client apps, and developers to work on them (I've personally contributed to Thunder). But it didn't do much for the development of Lemmy itself.
Mastodon has achieved critical mass among developer interest, I think, and is teetering on the edge of becoming a real mainstream option. When I first tried it many years ago, it was near unusable for the average normal person. And while it is now much better, it's been years. Lemmy is a lot closer to the start of that same road.
I took one passing look at how the thing is built, found out it's "basically all websockets for some reason", and stopped expecting it to work properly. Whenever it breaks I think "this is why you don't use websockets when you can just send a goddamn server side rendered web page or make an AJAX POST request" and I feel vindicated instead of annoyed.
They phased out websockets a while back.
Maybe that's when I mostly stopped getting the wrong page of stuff.
I'm on programming.dev and using boost and have only had a couple issues.
Occasional downtime.
I had a weird one where I had someone else's subscriptions and it gave a wrong user error every time I commented.
As for the apps. Unless they specifically code it to detect and handle the version it's going to break. Changes to the required input or the output between versions are going to break apps.
That's kind of the price you pay for running as a collection of instances and not a single one.
Overall it's been great. But it do keep an account on lemmy.world incase my one goes down.
Looks like I'll have to get an account on one of the big instances like lemmy.world as they have less problems.
I also have the boost app installed which I use with the fanaticus.social instance. Today when I try to post a comment I get an error "Incorrect login".
Do similar problems exist in Mastodon and Misskey?
That's a known issue. Tell the admin to look up Lemmy github.
I am not annoyed by Lemmy's constant glitches. It adds to the charm of the place.
Lemmy is a volunteer effort. You want everything to run corporate-smooth, that's 'X' and TikTok and Reddit.
Not really, the benefits outweigh the consequences.
The only major annoyance I’ve encountered so far was the federation issues with 0.19. My instance recently upgraded and broke federation with instances like .world, so I’ve been shouting into a void with my comments on some instances.
We had that at Lemmy.today too, but the instance admin fixed it just now. Go read their announcements communitity what they did.
Thanks! I'll link it to my instance's support community.
Yeah I hope it fixes other instances as well, would be cool. The more instances the better. :)
Sounds like your instance have federation issue, probably due to v0.19.0 updates. The latest version, v0.19.1, supposed to fix those federation issues. Not sure what's the server specs of your instance, but v0.19.x has increased database ram usage compared to previous versions, so if the instance is hosted on a tiny server, the admin may need to do some tinkering to make sure the federation process doesn't crash due to out-of-memory issue.
Unfortunately, seems like 0.19.1 didn't fix it. I still have issues on some instances and posts. There is still something wrong with federation. Hope it gets fixed soon.
The main issue I've had is occasional slowness. Haven't seen the issues you are seeing.
That's lemmy.world having problems =)
Right. Yeah, it is a little frustrating. A few months ago it was way worse though. But hopefully they smooth things out over time. Beauty of the fediverse though is that if not, we can always switch instances
I've not experienced any of the issues you mention. Why do you have to check other instances to see if your comments are visible. Trust that they will be eventually.
Looking at you lemm.ee
No reply from instance.
I've had fewer errors overall than I have Reddit, but your mileage is going to vary drastically based on your instance. I've briefly tried other instances, even fairly popular ones, and I'd describe the experience as nearly unusable.
Not at all, it was annoying for a few weeks when reddit imploded but since then I haven't had any problems.
I'm annoyed by my instance basically shutting down after I was told that it really didn't matter where I registered my Lemmy account back when I moved from Reddit.
I mean Lemmy World was at one point really unstable but this was due to an influx of Reddit refugees, malicious DDOS attacks and at one point malicious actors flooding the instance with CSAM - a reason why the Lemmy Shitpost community temporarily shut its doors.
I've not noticed glitching recently. Reddit's official app is the unstable crock of shit if anything.
I'm more annoyed that my instance presently reports a higher number of comments than what gets displayed (since moving to 19.0, I think). Sometimes, I can workaround that by changing the view, but often not. I wanna read what others have to contribute more than I care if they see what I say, but I was a lurker on the old site and I've never been on the mainstream socials.
tbf reddit also has this issue
No, if i have posts deleted like you I would be mad but other glitches doesn't annoy me that much. Issues happen all time in apps.
No. This is incredibly complex software run by people with little or no budget. I’m grateful that it exists at all.
Not really. I'm loving lemmy more than reddit. Reddit just feels so toxic with their algo frontpage.
One that's gotten me a few times is if you're typing a reply to someone, either in the comments or a PM, then mid-typing you upvote (or downvote) them (or anyone else), it deletes your comment-in-progress. I've lost a few comments that way, one of which took about 20 minutes to write which I just gave up on and didn't post afterward.
I also really don't like that the default language option is "Undetermined". It makes not labeling the correct language the default behavior, which makes a lot of foreign language material show up in my feed. Your own post and 2 of the 4 comments at the time of me posting are unlabeled.
I have to save written messages to notepad to prevent something like this from happening. And now I've started taking screenshots of comments that are important to me instead of hitting the "Save" button.
I don't like it either. I would like the feed to show posts only in my language. I asked my instance admin and he said there was nothing he could do about it.
(It would also be useful to add tags to posts to filter out unwanted content..)
If you remove "Undetermined" as a language on your profile, then all the unlabeled foreign language content should stop showing up for you. The problem is that all the unlabeled English content would also stop showing up for you, then. That's why having "Undetermined" be the default option is not good - it only makes the problem worse.
Thunder recently got post and comment draft saving. If you exit out of writing a comment or post, and then come back, the text is still there.
You can even have multiple replies to multiple comments in progress, and it keeps em separate.
On the positive note that gives you an opportunity to learn new languages. Maybe you understand one word in a meme post and that's enough to understand it. Maybe you look up what does it say in the post if you find it interesting. Not really an effective way to learn in itself but a way to expose yourself to foreign languages.
I guess I have had a great experience, I’ve never encountered any glitches with the mobile app. Always worked great.
No. My experience has ben once things become stable and slick is when the enshittining begins.
Liftoff stopped working for me two weeks ago. I had to download a new app to use Lemmy again. Still better than reddit.
I too have noticed that this app has stopped working. The developers haven't released an update for a long time.
So annoyed I’m going to demand my money back, or possibly demand they take advertising so them can afford some dev-ops staff
Kbin has been having serious problems lately
I’m struggling to use kbin right now, and even when it works, it’s incredibly slow. I’m amazed that this has been going on for days. I feel sorry for whoever is trying to fix it. It must be a nightmare. Where’s the best place to go for status updates and news from the devs?
Pretty sure that's on lemmy. They did something that introduced a lot of errors and added redundant overhead and it also broke kbin that handles all federated thread content.
Poor dude was on holiday too, lemmy kind of screwed up their timing and push here imo.
At first, absolutely. Very frustrating, kept feeling the pull back you-know-where. But then after a while, it became kind of a zen thing, if i'm using that word properly? It gives me time to breath a bit, rather than just doom scrolling at an increasing rate.
Maybe kind of part of the Lemmy Ritual? Maybe I'm strange.
Just because of the irony... breathe*
lol. I love it.
Maybe you should ask your admin in !meta@lemy.nl or !chat@lemy.nl what's up with the specific errors on your instance. Maybe they had some problems operating it. You can always switch instances. My posts never disappear without reason. (They can also be removed if they violate the terms of an instance or community.)
The other issues also annoy me. Federation is somewhat broken and posts and comments often don't propagate to other instances since Lemmy version 0.19.0 (and 0.19.1 which should have fixed that.) It's the fault of the Lemmy developers to release a broken update. We'll see if they continue doing that or if they have learned something. I think they want to hire a third full-time developer. Maybe that helps.
The need to re-login and unable to login with an older client happened once. Things like that can happen if bigger changes are made. I don't think this will become a regular thing. And it's not that annoying in my eyes. Most importantly clients have to handle that correctly and give a meaningful error message and guide you to the login page. But some proper error handling is also missing here.
So: Yes. The things you mentioned also annoy me. Lemmy has still lots of room for improvement. And it's nowhere near other federated platforms. I hope the Lemmy devs aren't repeating the most annoying mistakes and fix federation soon so this can be an issue of the past...
You are a bit unlucky now too, since federation is broken. Before that happened, everything was working fine. :)
You might want to check with an admin on your instance about those issues. I haven't run into anything like that.
Edit: I guess I spoke too soon. Five days later and apparently this comment never made it out of my instance.
On Lemmyworld and using boost for Lemmy, absolutely no bugs honestly. It's more stable than boost for reddit and that was head and shoulders above reddit's own cesspool of a mobile app.
The closest thing to a "bug" is poor optimization on posts with a bunch of hi res photos but that's it.