The big user experience problem is everyone is getting funneled into Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml, and they can’t scare fast enough.
But Lemmy is federated. So signup for a smaller instance. You’ll still be able to subscribe and post to communities on other instances.
Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.
Use and recommend lemm.ee, lemmy.one, and vlemmy.net to others
Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
Ok, but what if the instance I choose just ends suddenly?
Do I understand it correctly that on each one I have to create a new account and re-subscribe to all the communities etc,?
well this just happened with vlemmy.net, i was affected by this and had to manually resubscribe to 50 communities and recreate one, because of this someone made a tool to download your data off of lemmy and upload it to another instance https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
That's correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can't recall a Lemmy instance that's not for personal use ever shutting down); they've functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
Lemmy.fmhy.ml shutdown and hasnt come back yet. My understanding is that it won't be back, but that was the instance I signed up for initially to spread the server load
Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight. 
Next couple weeks should be interesting
My instance (civilloquy.com) has open sign-ups. ;)
I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
Good for you. I'd been trying that for months with no success. Finally .world let me in last week.
When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
Oh wow you're totally right. I was just able to log into one that I had never heard from! Thank you, good call!
I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.
It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.
Basically, due to the size and open registrations on some large instances, Beehaw admins decided to defederate because they didn’t have the manpower or systems in place to deal with the large volume of content.
I think I read that they have 4 people running everything and 2 aren't techy.
All in all, they have some of the biggest communities for gay folks, Trans folks, and other minority groups. Lots of trolls from large open instances were shit posting lots of hateful crap in those communities.
The Lemmy’s mod tools are still kind of janky and they couldn’t keep pace with the toxic trolling, so they made the call to defederate from instances like Lemmy.world temporarily, until some new mod tools get built.
All the admins from the defederated instances get it and they all appear to be on the same page.
That said, users got pissed because beehaw has one of the best tech communities. So now people on Lemmy.world don’t have their posts / comments show up in those communities.
Basically, they had two shitty options, and they went with protecting the vulnerable minority.
It’s temporary.
Beehaw is a community that wants to create a specific type of experience for its users, it wants to create a safer space and has stricter rules.
I think it’s personally a non-issue that people get riled up about. They’ve temporarily defederated from lemmy.world because of the large spikes in new users and wanting to have the moderation tools necessary to handle that while keeping their community the way they want it.
There is a subset of new Lemmy users who think this experience needs to be Reddit 2.0, that it needs to be perfect and totally smooth for new users, or else it will fail?
Personally, I don’t agree. I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit at all. In the last month, I’ve found that I didn’t realize just how bad my Reddit experience had become. I’m okay with the experience being a little rough around the edges here and adjusting together. It has become obvious based on how good my interactions were here. How solid and interesting the content was. I’m not fiending for my specific subreddits, I’m good to move on and find new areas to focus on the internet.
I have a separate account for Beehaw, all the iOS apps already have way way better functionality than the Reddit official app, I can seamlessly switch between accounts. It’s been absolutely amazing to see how much this site and experience has evolved in one month. I’m super excited for the future here.
I like the rough around the edges. Little tricks and nuances I’ve picked up. Makes it fun.
One thing I don’t miss is the "culture"… I hope this shift into the fediverse frees comment sections of the endless same dumb low effort puns, and even worse puns in the replies. Or fucking award speeches in comment edits, the same shitty jokes that nobody likes but somehow still perpetuate…
I really look forward to something new
I'm late to the conversation. Yeah, that's what I hated about Reddit. I've been using it since 2009, and I noticed that it got progressively worse the moment they introduced karma.
Beehaw defederated from other instances as users were getting around bans by creating new accounts on those instances. The admins in question are talking about how to address this.
They are overly sensitive special snowflakes that pipi their pampers if anybody that doesn't have 100% the same opinions as them is allowed to use the internet
Motives aside, the point is one account won't always get you everywhere. Doing a little research before picking a home instance can't hurt.
That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren't is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can't apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don't even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it's something admins set themselves) would be useful.
What are some smaller ones that aren't full of communists or snowflake safe space losers that wants to sanitize the internet?
The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.
So signup for a smaller instance
Unless you want to create a community on that instance. You can only create communities in the instance you sign up.
...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
Technically it doesn't matter, but I expect communities will take off better in instances better suited to it. I doubt a gaming community on lemmy.ca will become the massive gaming community. I doubt c/Toronto will take off in a UK instance. Etc.
A message in a bottle is easier to use. Also, the maintenance cost is negligible, since the system is powered by renewable wave energy. The only downside is the lag, which can vary from a few days to several centuries.
I know some pensioners in my neighbourhood that'd love to talk to you about that.
Just not using the app is better than using the app.
I can't fathom how they bought a good app, put a dev "team" on it for 7 years, and still don't have half the features some neckbeards in their mom's basements without access to the backeng still managed to put into their apps.
What a pack of incompetent fucks.
A surprisingly low bar
So true.
I want to be mad but FFS Reddit had Conde Nast money for most of its shittery so they had NO excuse except incompetence.
At least Fediverse servers are typically Steve's old laptop or some shit so it's understandable.
It's generally more like "Steve's 10 eur/mo cloud server in which they run ten other things next to Lemmy, which is written by two devs and barely held together by duct tape and prayers"
But that doesn't change the overall point.
Good point. Who the hell hosts their own server anymore?
Honestly, it's negligent if a major company does host their own servers at this point. Big cloud server companies specialize in that and can do it better than others, with better guarantees of stability and maintenance. Pretty much the reason people specialize in everything else.
What you're saying here is literally a punchline in infosec because of how many breaches are down to incompetent cloud service providers, because said cloud service providers take security about as seriously as the aforementioned c-suite does.
*EDIT No, the c-suite thing doesn't make sense. Shut up. I recast this post and removed a bit. I don't need your approval. I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS
Lol what? Every server has down time. But the big cloud companies have actual liability for theirs
You are entirely ignorant of how anything works. There's no "liability" unless they seriously fuck a goat. Downtime is expected and, in fact, built into contracts. X amount of downtime for service, Y amount for unforeseen circumstances, Z amount for shiggles. There may be some prorating built into it, but even that will be after a certain amount of downtime.
No matter how you slice it the only reason anyone uses cloud services is to cut costs. There actual facts simply do not pan out when you're talking about security.
Those contracts are exactly what I mean. A certain, small amount of downtime is allowed for, and it's expected to be fixed shortly. If either of those things aren't true, then the business is in breach of that agreement.
But I know where OC was coming from, 15-25 years ago it would have been the crap old laptop, the cardboard box server, the DEC PDP-11 the University is still powering for some reason.
… the PDP-11 😂
it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
About tree fiddy
it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
The instance I'm replying from is a 5 eur/mo box from Hetzner.
Your main concerns are gonna be active user count & storage space. Especially if you decide to allow image or god forbid video uploads. Having a bunch of inactive users aren't going to affect costs that much as long as they don't have, like, a milion subscriptions. (If they're all subscribed to the same community things will "deduplicate")
Do you have any specific resources or suggestions? I’m a software dev with lots of DigitalOcean experience looking to host my own instance. Also, can you log in to wefwef through your instance, or how do you access everything, specifically on mobile?
Depending on how well you know your way around, my recommendation is to not use the Ansible setup but instead treat it as documentation while doing things your way. It has quite a bit of strange stuff going on (postfix? two nginx installs with only one being in a container?) and seems to be missing important things such as SSH hardening. It also assumes it'll be the only thing running in your server just in general (horrible yet common practice, unfortunately) so if you have anything set up it may or may not clobber over it to do things it's own way, and end up breaking something.
Also, can you log in to wefwef through your instance, or how do you access everything, specifically on mobile?
I haven't tried wefwef in particular but all native apps I tried work just fine. An issue I can see cropping up from wefwef is that Lemmy's CORS policies are way too restrictive by default. No idea if they do any kind of proxying to get around that but that would be the main issue I'd imagine.
What's the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.
There are many guides on getting started with Linux servers as a whole. I recommend installing Debian Bookworm on a virtual machine or a spare laptop at first and going through the writeups all major cloud providers have, just to get a feel for using the terminal & initial setup (SSH hardening and reverse proxy configuration and so on)
After getting an initial feel for Linux admining, start reading up on Docker, Docker Compose, and containers in general. Avoid Podman until you're experienced with Docker as it's just different enough to trip you up. You can also check out LXC/LXD although it's way less popular.
Oh, and speaking of Docker: UFW AND DOCKER WILL NOT WORK TOGETHER! DOCKER BYPASSES UFW (just making sure you don't learn this until it's too late)
Be careful of guides that are old (even a year makes a difference) or for different "distros" than the one you have. An exception for the second case is the Arch Linux wiki, which is one of the best resources just in general, aside from a few Arch specific bits like the exact package names to install. You should also use Arch's "man pages" reference, as they're built from the latest versions of packages compared to other man page renderers that are frequently outdated (like die.net)
Lemmy itself is harder to get right because the instructions so far are intended for people who kinda know what they're doing, but once you have the base Linux admin knowledge, it won't be that hard to pick up the parts necessary to get working with something like Lemmy.
Only one way to find out ;)
On a more serious note... I'm not sure if much has changed since then (probably, things have been moving fast...), but lemmy.world was hosted on about a $150 / mo server:
That's pretty beefy. You could probably get away with much less for a smaller instance.
But...but...spez said it will cause 200k per month!
That's because he wants all 55 million active users accessing his servers so he shove ads down their throats.
To be fair, Reddit is a lot bigger than any Lemmy instance, and Lemmy instances have the benefit of being decentralised, so the load is on many different servers owned by different people as opposed to one group of servers owned by one company.
Reddit's database was pretty poorly designed. They designed it to be really flexible so they could make changes easily early on, but it was highly inefficient. I don't know if it's still like that, but the old website's source code is public and it is very inefficient.
Are all of the lemmy servers different? I just signed up on lemmy.world
Well, they are different server with different versions of lemmy running.
But I think lemmy.world is running great again
Given the... frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and...
I mean it's getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.
I’m worried about the search function. Every post ever made?
Like the good old times
It's great to be here. All part of the fun of being apart of something new.
I feel much as I did 12 years ago when I created my reddit account. I feel the winds of change in my bones.
It's early days here. Give it some time...
It's part of the charm :D
Agreed! Lemmy kinda captures the same sense of excitement and experimentation that the early internet seemed to have.
For real! Seems like everyone jumped ship and expects a flawless integration from Reddit. This tech is relatively new and provided by volunteers. Give it some time!
Especially with the massive influx of users on this instance. I for one am quite happy with the admins and how they're holding up during this. lol
Ngl. I am having fun.
It is nice honestly. I appreciate all of you that have joined. This is going to be fun!
Would upvote but I keep getting server-side errors
That's interesting but have you considered that Value of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject?
Does the Narwhal bacon again?
Oh god
Only at midnight.
Not sure if this is meant to be negative or positive but I for one like all the growing pains and issues. It makes the whole experience a little more engaging for me. I really like reading up on what problems are happening and how the teams are working towards solutions. I especially like the technical details that are just a little over my head because it’s fun to learn about!
This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it's better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife's edge of creation, a new birth.
It just feels so weird to have big threads with good fresh discussions going on hours after the post.
Not to say there isn't an occasional asshole here and there during this wave, but I don't think reddit has ever felt like this at any point.
It's because sorting comments by "hot" prioritizes new comments more than old comments even taking into account votes. So a 3d old comment with 50 votes might appear below a 2h old comment with 5 votes. Unlike Reddit which just pushes the first comments to the top and anything new will drown in the sea of comments and never surface or be seen.
The instances are volunteer-ran and make no profit, give them some time to iron everything out
Where do i donate?
Look at the sidebar info on your instance, there should be links for donations.
Gotta start somewhere...
Yeah, this is taking me back to 2013 reddit. Really enjoying it here. I'm hoping it continues to walk down this path.
Maybe some upvote tally, maybe some inconspicuous text-based ads...
Laughs in lemm.ee
yeah just made an account here, it's so much faster
I'm dumb about this whole fediverse thing. Do I need to make an account on the lemm.ee instance to enjoy that sweet stability?
Or can I just "swap to a new instance" and keep my incredibly tiny comment history?
Using lemmy.world and constantly getting gateway errors.
Wound up just making a lemm.ee account.
Let's see if this is noticably more stable.
Weird, thought I was on this account when I made the comment.
You can't migrate accounts (yet?), so you can only make a new one at lemm.ee. Since lemm.ee is federated, you will be able to enjoy all of the sae content, regardless of ir being hosted on Lemmy world, ml or anywhere else...
For those of you who, like me, are coming from Apollo you guys can try wefwef.app. It’s great
It's a nice app, but I'm really wondering who came up with that name and why. That's not how you name something if you want it to be successful.
Perhaps they're not trying to "be successful"?
It's getting a name change.
I would hope so lol
I know this night sound like a dumb comment, but it's kind of worth thinking about.
Since it isn't an iOS app, they could probably make a version of it which isn't so iOS inspired, because frankly that layout is confusing to anyone who isn't used to it.
I know Apple have a way of doing things, and they're like apps to look a certain way, but if you're not used to it it's not intuitive at all.
But the point of wefwef is to feel familiar to those who used and are missing Apollo, the most popular iOS app.
There has been a groundswell of Android apps starting up and not a great deal of activity in the iOS-specific space. So, wefwef is welcome for those looking for something that ticks that box.
I just put a webpage link to my Lemmy homepage on my Home Screen. I haven't found the ability to comment or anything though, and I'm signed in.
Edit- apparently I was signed out. 🤣
Waiting for sync
I keep getting “cant load sever data” with this app. Is this just a lemmy thing or an app thing.
In one of the posts a couple days ago the developer of wefef stated that the app is getting rate limited by lemmy.world servers because so many people are using it. I think they were trying to resolve it but I am still getting the same issue occasionally. It’s just growing pains of the whole ecosystem & totally expected and normal. I’m happy to be an early adopter of all this stuff and watching it grow and mature will be an exciting adventure!
If you're on one of the bigger instances (lemmy.world for example) use https://lemmyverse.net/ to pick a smaller, less crowded instanceto call home.
I created an account on reddthat.com earlier today, and it's way less laggy than lemmy.world (my initial instance).
Hopefully in time lemmy gains functionality thatmakis account backup/porting easy so moving instances in nbd.
I even got an error page the first time I tried to load this post. Just like old times! 🥲
And here I am laughing on my speedy private instance. For real, the best part of Lemmy is if your experience is bad you can hop to a different instance and not miss a post
Question about this, is it just a speedier general browsing on other instances as well? Or just your local posts?
Everything is faster. For the most part, your local instance will download posts and comments for any community you (or anyone else on your instance) is subscribed to. So when you log in, you log into your server and browse the content locally (posts from everywhere) while your server in the background constantly is receiving updates through the ActivityPub protocol.
I literally have no delay in using Lemmy in any way.
What about the "all" stream? Is that also preloaded to the server?
The "all" stream would be all of the posts from the combined subs of the users on the instance. So if there's a community nobody is subscribed to, it won't appear on all. This is true of all instances. Many smaller ones will employ bots to crawl Lemmy and sub to communities to give the large instance "all" feeling.
That being said, yeah it's all preloaded onto your local server. There is no difference in speed. Doesn't matter if it's active/subed or new/all they all load the same
I'd highly encourage everyone to find smaller instances and leave lemmy.world for the immediate expats. Find something that aligns with your values. Or if you are technically literate enough host your own instance. If you have an old desktop computer you've already got everything you need.
I do that on my own instance too :D, private and small instances are really the way to go!
I should probably build an instance on my little home server. Is there a guide for that somewhere?
It can apparently take up a decent amount of space depending on how many communities you subscribe to.
How many communities you subscribed and after two weeks how much data does it represents on your storage ?
On my instance we've got about 100 communities subscribed to. Started it first week of June, since then the instance is up to a little over 4 GB of disk space. YMMV depending on instance size.
Not OP but I can answer with my own stats:
In just a week, With BTRFS compression (compress-force=zstd:3) & deduplication (via bees), media is at about 1GB (and I am subscribed to media-heavy communities like 196) and the postgres DB is at about 550MB (which is also currently shared with Matrix Dendrite)
At "idle" (as you can be while being connected to ActivityPub & Matrix), the immediate CPU and RAM usage breakdown per container is:
Net IO you shouldn't really care about as that includes inter-container networking. I'm trying to find how much outgoing data have been transferred but because the month just ended I have no idea how accurate the numbers are.
Yeah but these guys aren't trying to make a profit from us and Reddit had venture capital money.
Yeah, every time I try to upvote something, it'll take like 10-15 seconds to register
That depends on the instance you’re on.
To be fair, it worked well right before reddit cut off api access. This will probably happen everytime reddit does something stupid to drive away users. In other words, it could happen every two week based on how spez is lately.
I would just wish there would be a new Reddit view as well. It is just so annoying having to click on the images to zoom in
Gross
The best part of this post, is the segue into the new !showerthoughts community
I forgive it. It has tremendous potential
Well, if its too slow, you can just self-host it.
I have to check this... As that would the best way to have control of the account without risking that the instance were I am suddenly dissapears although I guess I need to setup cloudfare or something on my domain to avoid direct attacks to my dedicated server I guess as the instance where I am would be public to other users.
That and some domain provider with privacy protection which most have nowadays so my name and address isn't public directly on my domain info.
It's just lemmy.world, because majority of people jumped on it.
Try lemm.ee instance. It is REALLY fast compared to lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. And it is also general instance, not some theme-specific.
To be fair, lemm.ee has an entire order of magnitude less monthly users than world. I think it's at the perfect size, actually.
Wait i have only been using lemm.ee, are you saying ive been lemming with 1 nut sack stapled to my leg?
No. Because of the federated nature of these servers, it just means you have a fast server ;)
Even the user interface brings back the memory...
i still get substribe in peding. it was one week ago.
All the old Redditors jumped ship. Let's hope the new redditors and spam bots don't jump ship with them.
Unfortunately, if there's any hope of lemmy really taking off, they'll come eventually. All popular sites and services have to deal with it at some point.
I'd prefer the new redditors to the elitist ones, but well, what can I do.
I'm afraid you're stuck with elitist pricks like me now :p
It's slower than reddit ever was.... at least in the 14 years I was there.
I joined a smaller instance that more fits my interests, but is still federated with the "popular" ones I like. So far it works great.
I still haven’t got a clue what this means. Goddamn it.
Lemmy is not one big application like reddit. Instead everyone can download Lemmy and host their own >instance<. Each instance can have their own users, their own communities/subs and admins.
Since Lemmy is part of the >fediverse<, it means that each Lemmy instance can interact with each other, and can even interact with other applications of the fediverse (like mastodon, which is more similar to twitter).
Because everyone can make their own Lemmy instance, it is also possible for bad faith actors to make one. They could create many accounts on their own instance, and try to mess with the other Lemmy instances by either posting a lot of comments, reporting a lot of content, or a number of other things. To prevent that from being an actual issue, each instance has the option to >defederate< other instances. (I am not 100% sure on the following so please correct me if I'm wrong) Defederating means that users of instance A cannot interact with the content or users of instance B, if instance A defederated instance B.
Since the performance of website is dependent on the instance you use, you can try to find another instance with less users and a more stable server. As long as it is not defederated by many other servers it will be effectively be the same experience as being on another instance.
Could I think of the federation as like nations giving each others' citizens a visa, or is that too off the mark to use as a metaphor?
I think it's too far off. It's more like countries joining European Union - they are still individual countries, but they share stuff with all other countries that are part of the union/federation.
I think it kinda works, but it misses the mark in that you don't need to 'travel' to another server to see the communities and posts from that server.
It's more like every instance is a post office, and when you make a post or comment at your local post office, they also send it out to a bunch of other post offices. So when you rock up to your local post office (instance), you can see all the activity at that post office, but also all the activity that has come in from federated post offices.
The top three instances a currently overcrowded. I recommend checking out a smaller instance (for example https://laguna.chat).
Smaller instances are still able to access to same content. But it is just a different server that processes the content.
But are they ? I posted a comment a couple of days ago via lemmy.world on a 'remotely hosted' community, and then viewed the same post via its 'native' instance, and my comment never showed up, even days later.
There are some issues regarding sync. If an instance is not reachable when an action is synced (e.g. due to overloaded servers), the sync is never attempted again and the instances will stay out of sync.
I love that your first instinct after being here just a few hours is to bitch about things. Maybe donate and thank the devs for the free work they're doing so you don't have to deal with the bullshit on Reddit, and then in a month or so when the user influx has calmed down a bit, then you can bitch if you want.
Did you think redditors will stop moaning just cause they are in a new place? Bitching is universal as long as three or more people can gather around on some corner of the internet.
The big user experience problem is everyone is getting funneled into Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml, and they can’t scare fast enough.
But Lemmy is federated. So signup for a smaller instance. You’ll still be able to subscribe and post to communities on other instances.
Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.
Use and recommend lemm.ee, lemmy.one, and vlemmy.net to others
Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
I run https://thelemmy.club - people are always welcome here :)
Ok, but what if the instance I choose just ends suddenly? Do I understand it correctly that on each one I have to create a new account and re-subscribe to all the communities etc,?
well this just happened with vlemmy.net, i was affected by this and had to manually resubscribe to 50 communities and recreate one, because of this someone made a tool to download your data off of lemmy and upload it to another instance https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
That's correct though account migration is planned for some point in the future, or at least noted as a desirable feature by the Devs. Maybe even linking accounts across instances?
Having to resubscribe to all your communities is annoying but I imagine third party apps could streamline that process when they get released/refined.
Aside from what Coelacanth said, those instances are no more likely to shut down than lemmy.world (I can't recall a Lemmy instance that's not for personal use ever shutting down); they've functioned just fine for years and have even been upgraded for the surge of users too
Lemmy.fmhy.ml shutdown and hasnt come back yet. My understanding is that it won't be back, but that was the instance I signed up for initially to spread the server load
Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight. 
Next couple weeks should be interesting
My instance (civilloquy.com) has open sign-ups. ;)
I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
try mine.
Good for you. I'd been trying that for months with no success. Finally .world let me in last week.
When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
Oh wow you're totally right. I was just able to log into one that I had never heard from! Thank you, good call!
I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.
What does it mean to say that Lemmy is federated?
Basically there are many different Lemmy servers. Http://lemmy.world Http://lemmy.ml Http://shit.just.works Etc etc
It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.
Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.
What's going on with beehaw? I'm a bit out of the loop.
Post by beehaw admins
Basically, due to the size and open registrations on some large instances, Beehaw admins decided to defederate because they didn’t have the manpower or systems in place to deal with the large volume of content.
I think I read that they have 4 people running everything and 2 aren't techy.
All in all, they have some of the biggest communities for gay folks, Trans folks, and other minority groups. Lots of trolls from large open instances were shit posting lots of hateful crap in those communities.
The Lemmy’s mod tools are still kind of janky and they couldn’t keep pace with the toxic trolling, so they made the call to defederate from instances like Lemmy.world temporarily, until some new mod tools get built.
All the admins from the defederated instances get it and they all appear to be on the same page.
That said, users got pissed because beehaw has one of the best tech communities. So now people on Lemmy.world don’t have their posts / comments show up in those communities.
Basically, they had two shitty options, and they went with protecting the vulnerable minority.
It’s temporary.
Beehaw is a community that wants to create a specific type of experience for its users, it wants to create a safer space and has stricter rules.
I think it’s personally a non-issue that people get riled up about. They’ve temporarily defederated from lemmy.world because of the large spikes in new users and wanting to have the moderation tools necessary to handle that while keeping their community the way they want it.
There is a subset of new Lemmy users who think this experience needs to be Reddit 2.0, that it needs to be perfect and totally smooth for new users, or else it will fail?
Personally, I don’t agree. I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit at all. In the last month, I’ve found that I didn’t realize just how bad my Reddit experience had become. I’m okay with the experience being a little rough around the edges here and adjusting together. It has become obvious based on how good my interactions were here. How solid and interesting the content was. I’m not fiending for my specific subreddits, I’m good to move on and find new areas to focus on the internet.
I have a separate account for Beehaw, all the iOS apps already have way way better functionality than the Reddit official app, I can seamlessly switch between accounts. It’s been absolutely amazing to see how much this site and experience has evolved in one month. I’m super excited for the future here.
I like the rough around the edges. Little tricks and nuances I’ve picked up. Makes it fun.
One thing I don’t miss is the "culture"… I hope this shift into the fediverse frees comment sections of the endless same dumb low effort puns, and even worse puns in the replies. Or fucking award speeches in comment edits, the same shitty jokes that nobody likes but somehow still perpetuate…
I really look forward to something new
I'm late to the conversation. Yeah, that's what I hated about Reddit. I've been using it since 2009, and I noticed that it got progressively worse the moment they introduced karma.
Beehaw defederated from other instances as users were getting around bans by creating new accounts on those instances. The admins in question are talking about how to address this.
They are overly sensitive special snowflakes that pipi their pampers if anybody that doesn't have 100% the same opinions as them is allowed to use the internet
Motives aside, the point is one account won't always get you everywhere. Doing a little research before picking a home instance can't hurt.
That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren't is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can't apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don't even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it's something admins set themselves) would be useful.
What are some smaller ones that aren't full of communists or snowflake safe space losers that wants to sanitize the internet?
The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.
Unless you want to create a community on that instance. You can only create communities in the instance you sign up.
...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
Technically it doesn't matter, but I expect communities will take off better in instances better suited to it. I doubt a gaming community on lemmy.ca will become the massive gaming community. I doubt c/Toronto will take off in a UK instance. Etc.
Still better than the official reddit app.
Smoke signals would be better than the official app.
I've considered switching to carrier pigeons
Do I have the proposal for you! RFC2549
All you need are two tin cans joined by string.
A message in a bottle is easier to use. Also, the maintenance cost is negligible, since the system is powered by renewable wave energy. The only downside is the lag, which can vary from a few days to several centuries.
I know some pensioners in my neighbourhood that'd love to talk to you about that.
Just not using the app is better than using the app.
I can't fathom how they bought a good app, put a dev "team" on it for 7 years, and still don't have half the features some neckbeards in their mom's basements without access to the backeng still managed to put into their apps.
What a pack of incompetent fucks.
A surprisingly low bar
So true.
I want to be mad but FFS Reddit had Conde Nast money for most of its shittery so they had NO excuse except incompetence.
At least Fediverse servers are typically Steve's old laptop or some shit so it's understandable.
It's generally more like "Steve's 10 eur/mo cloud server in which they run ten other things next to Lemmy, which is written by two devs and barely held together by duct tape and prayers"
But that doesn't change the overall point.
Good point. Who the hell hosts their own server anymore?
Honestly, it's negligent if a major company does host their own servers at this point. Big cloud server companies specialize in that and can do it better than others, with better guarantees of stability and maintenance. Pretty much the reason people specialize in everything else.
What you're saying here is literally a punchline in infosec because of how many breaches are down to incompetent cloud service providers, because said cloud service providers take security about as seriously as the aforementioned c-suite does.
*EDIT No, the c-suite thing doesn't make sense. Shut up. I recast this post and removed a bit. I don't need your approval. I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS
Lol what? Every server has down time. But the big cloud companies have actual liability for theirs
You are entirely ignorant of how anything works. There's no "liability" unless they seriously fuck a goat. Downtime is expected and, in fact, built into contracts. X amount of downtime for service, Y amount for unforeseen circumstances, Z amount for shiggles. There may be some prorating built into it, but even that will be after a certain amount of downtime.
No matter how you slice it the only reason anyone uses cloud services is to cut costs. There actual facts simply do not pan out when you're talking about security.
Those contracts are exactly what I mean. A certain, small amount of downtime is allowed for, and it's expected to be fixed shortly. If either of those things aren't true, then the business is in breach of that agreement.
Anyway no u r ignorant. Peace out
Businesses chose cloud providers because they think that it will cut costs.
But I know where OC was coming from, 15-25 years ago it would have been the crap old laptop, the cardboard box server, the DEC PDP-11 the University is still powering for some reason.
… the PDP-11 😂
it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
About tree fiddy
it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
The instance I'm replying from is a 5 eur/mo box from Hetzner.
Your main concerns are gonna be active user count & storage space. Especially if you decide to allow image or god forbid video uploads. Having a bunch of inactive users aren't going to affect costs that much as long as they don't have, like, a milion subscriptions. (If they're all subscribed to the same community things will "deduplicate")
Do you have any specific resources or suggestions? I’m a software dev with lots of DigitalOcean experience looking to host my own instance. Also, can you log in to wefwef through your instance, or how do you access everything, specifically on mobile?
Depending on how well you know your way around, my recommendation is to not use the Ansible setup but instead treat it as documentation while doing things your way. It has quite a bit of strange stuff going on (postfix? two nginx installs with only one being in a container?) and seems to be missing important things such as SSH hardening. It also assumes it'll be the only thing running in your server just in general (horrible yet common practice, unfortunately) so if you have anything set up it may or may not clobber over it to do things it's own way, and end up breaking something.
I haven't tried wefwef in particular but all native apps I tried work just fine. An issue I can see cropping up from wefwef is that Lemmy's CORS policies are way too restrictive by default. No idea if they do any kind of proxying to get around that but that would be the main issue I'd imagine.
What's the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.
There are many guides on getting started with Linux servers as a whole. I recommend installing Debian Bookworm on a virtual machine or a spare laptop at first and going through the writeups all major cloud providers have, just to get a feel for using the terminal & initial setup (SSH hardening and reverse proxy configuration and so on)
After getting an initial feel for Linux admining, start reading up on Docker, Docker Compose, and containers in general. Avoid Podman until you're experienced with Docker as it's just different enough to trip you up. You can also check out LXC/LXD although it's way less popular.
Oh, and speaking of Docker: UFW AND DOCKER WILL NOT WORK TOGETHER! DOCKER BYPASSES UFW (just making sure you don't learn this until it's too late)
Be careful of guides that are old (even a year makes a difference) or for different "distros" than the one you have. An exception for the second case is the Arch Linux wiki, which is one of the best resources just in general, aside from a few Arch specific bits like the exact package names to install. You should also use Arch's "man pages" reference, as they're built from the latest versions of packages compared to other man page renderers that are frequently outdated (like die.net)
Lemmy itself is harder to get right because the instructions so far are intended for people who kinda know what they're doing, but once you have the base Linux admin knowledge, it won't be that hard to pick up the parts necessary to get working with something like Lemmy.
Only one way to find out ;)
On a more serious note... I'm not sure if much has changed since then (probably, things have been moving fast...), but lemmy.world was hosted on about a $150 / mo server:
https://blog.mastodon.world/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax (it's the most expensive option here)
That's pretty beefy. You could probably get away with much less for a smaller instance.
But...but...spez said it will cause 200k per month!
That's because he wants all 55 million active users accessing his servers so he shove ads down their throats.
To be fair, Reddit is a lot bigger than any Lemmy instance, and Lemmy instances have the benefit of being decentralised, so the load is on many different servers owned by different people as opposed to one group of servers owned by one company.
Reddit's database was pretty poorly designed. They designed it to be really flexible so they could make changes easily early on, but it was highly inefficient. I don't know if it's still like that, but the old website's source code is public and it is very inefficient.
You gotta use lemmy.world for the OG experience 😂
Are all of the lemmy servers different? I just signed up on lemmy.world
Well, they are different server with different versions of lemmy running. But I think lemmy.world is running great again
Given the... frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and...
I mean it's getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.
I’m worried about the search function. Every post ever made?
Like the good old times
It's great to be here. All part of the fun of being apart of something new.
I feel much as I did 12 years ago when I created my reddit account. I feel the winds of change in my bones.
It's early days here. Give it some time...
It's part of the charm :D
Agreed! Lemmy kinda captures the same sense of excitement and experimentation that the early internet seemed to have.
For real! Seems like everyone jumped ship and expects a flawless integration from Reddit. This tech is relatively new and provided by volunteers. Give it some time!
Especially with the massive influx of users on this instance. I for one am quite happy with the admins and how they're holding up during this. lol
Ngl. I am having fun.
It is nice honestly. I appreciate all of you that have joined. This is going to be fun!
Would upvote but I keep getting server-side errors
That's interesting but have you considered that Value of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject?
Does the Narwhal bacon again?
Oh god
Only at midnight.
Not sure if this is meant to be negative or positive but I for one like all the growing pains and issues. It makes the whole experience a little more engaging for me. I really like reading up on what problems are happening and how the teams are working towards solutions. I especially like the technical details that are just a little over my head because it’s fun to learn about!
This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it's better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife's edge of creation, a new birth.
It just feels so weird to have big threads with good fresh discussions going on hours after the post.
Not to say there isn't an occasional asshole here and there during this wave, but I don't think reddit has ever felt like this at any point.
It's because sorting comments by "hot" prioritizes new comments more than old comments even taking into account votes. So a 3d old comment with 50 votes might appear below a 2h old comment with 5 votes. Unlike Reddit which just pushes the first comments to the top and anything new will drown in the sea of comments and never surface or be seen.
The instances are volunteer-ran and make no profit, give them some time to iron everything out
Where do i donate?
Look at the sidebar info on your instance, there should be links for donations.
Gotta start somewhere...
Yeah, this is taking me back to 2013 reddit. Really enjoying it here. I'm hoping it continues to walk down this path.
Maybe some upvote tally, maybe some inconspicuous text-based ads...
Laughs in lemm.ee
yeah just made an account here, it's so much faster
I'm dumb about this whole fediverse thing. Do I need to make an account on the lemm.ee instance to enjoy that sweet stability?
Or can I just "swap to a new instance" and keep my incredibly tiny comment history?
Using lemmy.world and constantly getting gateway errors.
Wound up just making a lemm.ee account.
Let's see if this is noticably more stable.
Weird, thought I was on this account when I made the comment.
You can't migrate accounts (yet?), so you can only make a new one at lemm.ee. Since lemm.ee is federated, you will be able to enjoy all of the sae content, regardless of ir being hosted on Lemmy world, ml or anywhere else...
For those of you who, like me, are coming from Apollo you guys can try wefwef.app. It’s great
It's a nice app, but I'm really wondering who came up with that name and why. That's not how you name something if you want it to be successful.
Perhaps they're not trying to "be successful"?
It's getting a name change.
I would hope so lol
I know this night sound like a dumb comment, but it's kind of worth thinking about.
Since it isn't an iOS app, they could probably make a version of it which isn't so iOS inspired, because frankly that layout is confusing to anyone who isn't used to it.
I know Apple have a way of doing things, and they're like apps to look a certain way, but if you're not used to it it's not intuitive at all.
But the point of wefwef is to feel familiar to those who used and are missing Apollo, the most popular iOS app.
There has been a groundswell of Android apps starting up and not a great deal of activity in the iOS-specific space. So, wefwef is welcome for those looking for something that ticks that box.
I just put a webpage link to my Lemmy homepage on my Home Screen. I haven't found the ability to comment or anything though, and I'm signed in.
Edit- apparently I was signed out. 🤣
Waiting for sync
I keep getting “cant load sever data” with this app. Is this just a lemmy thing or an app thing.
In one of the posts a couple days ago the developer of wefef stated that the app is getting rate limited by lemmy.world servers because so many people are using it. I think they were trying to resolve it but I am still getting the same issue occasionally. It’s just growing pains of the whole ecosystem & totally expected and normal. I’m happy to be an early adopter of all this stuff and watching it grow and mature will be an exciting adventure!
If you're on one of the bigger instances (lemmy.world for example) use https://lemmyverse.net/ to pick a smaller, less crowded instanceto call home.
I created an account on reddthat.com earlier today, and it's way less laggy than lemmy.world (my initial instance).
Hopefully in time lemmy gains functionality thatmakis account backup/porting easy so moving instances in nbd.
I even got an error page the first time I tried to load this post. Just like old times! 🥲
search actually works here.
already better than old reddit.
Check out mlmym if you want to see it resemble the old.reddit experience too.
generic live instance
old.lemmy.world
old.lemmy.ca
github
Anything to make you feel at home 🥰
And here I am laughing on my speedy private instance. For real, the best part of Lemmy is if your experience is bad you can hop to a different instance and not miss a post
Question about this, is it just a speedier general browsing on other instances as well? Or just your local posts?
Everything is faster. For the most part, your local instance will download posts and comments for any community you (or anyone else on your instance) is subscribed to. So when you log in, you log into your server and browse the content locally (posts from everywhere) while your server in the background constantly is receiving updates through the ActivityPub protocol.
I literally have no delay in using Lemmy in any way.
What about the "all" stream? Is that also preloaded to the server?
The "all" stream would be all of the posts from the combined subs of the users on the instance. So if there's a community nobody is subscribed to, it won't appear on all. This is true of all instances. Many smaller ones will employ bots to crawl Lemmy and sub to communities to give the large instance "all" feeling.
That being said, yeah it's all preloaded onto your local server. There is no difference in speed. Doesn't matter if it's active/subed or new/all they all load the same
I'd highly encourage everyone to find smaller instances and leave lemmy.world for the immediate expats. Find something that aligns with your values. Or if you are technically literate enough host your own instance. If you have an old desktop computer you've already got everything you need.
I do that on my own instance too :D, private and small instances are really the way to go!
I should probably build an instance on my little home server. Is there a guide for that somewhere?
Right on the lemmy website. 🙂
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html
It can apparently take up a decent amount of space depending on how many communities you subscribe to.
How many communities you subscribed and after two weeks how much data does it represents on your storage ?
On my instance we've got about 100 communities subscribed to. Started it first week of June, since then the instance is up to a little over 4 GB of disk space. YMMV depending on instance size.
Not OP but I can answer with my own stats:
In just a week, With BTRFS compression (compress-force=zstd:3) & deduplication (via bees), media is at about 1GB (and I am subscribed to media-heavy communities like 196) and the postgres DB is at about 550MB (which is also currently shared with Matrix Dendrite)
At "idle" (as you can be while being connected to ActivityPub & Matrix), the immediate CPU and RAM usage breakdown per container is:
Net IO you shouldn't really care about as that includes inter-container networking. I'm trying to find how much outgoing data have been transferred but because the month just ended I have no idea how accurate the numbers are.
Yeah but these guys aren't trying to make a profit from us and Reddit had venture capital money.
Yeah, every time I try to upvote something, it'll take like 10-15 seconds to register
That depends on the instance you’re on.
To be fair, it worked well right before reddit cut off api access. This will probably happen everytime reddit does something stupid to drive away users. In other words, it could happen every two week based on how spez is lately.
I would just wish there would be a new Reddit view as well. It is just so annoying having to click on the images to zoom in
Gross
The best part of this post, is the segue into the new !showerthoughts community
I forgive it. It has tremendous potential
Well, if its too slow, you can just self-host it.
I have to check this... As that would the best way to have control of the account without risking that the instance were I am suddenly dissapears although I guess I need to setup cloudfare or something on my domain to avoid direct attacks to my dedicated server I guess as the instance where I am would be public to other users.
That and some domain provider with privacy protection which most have nowadays so my name and address isn't public directly on my domain info.
It's just lemmy.world, because majority of people jumped on it.
https://files.catbox.moe/kfvn0u.png
Use different instances to get better experience (you can still subscribe to communities that aren't on your server)
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/tree/main
Try lemm.ee instance. It is REALLY fast compared to lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. And it is also general instance, not some theme-specific.
To be fair, lemm.ee has an entire order of magnitude less monthly users than world. I think it's at the perfect size, actually.
Wait i have only been using lemm.ee, are you saying ive been lemming with 1 nut sack stapled to my leg?
No. Because of the federated nature of these servers, it just means you have a fast server ;)
Even the user interface brings back the memory...
i still get substribe in peding. it was one week ago.
All the old Redditors jumped ship. Let's hope the new redditors and spam bots don't jump ship with them.
Unfortunately, if there's any hope of lemmy really taking off, they'll come eventually. All popular sites and services have to deal with it at some point.
I'd prefer the new redditors to the elitist ones, but well, what can I do.
I'm afraid you're stuck with elitist pricks like me now :p
It's slower than reddit ever was.... at least in the 14 years I was there.
I joined a smaller instance that more fits my interests, but is still federated with the "popular" ones I like. So far it works great.
I still haven’t got a clue what this means. Goddamn it.
Lemmy is not one big application like reddit. Instead everyone can download Lemmy and host their own >instance<. Each instance can have their own users, their own communities/subs and admins.
Since Lemmy is part of the >fediverse<, it means that each Lemmy instance can interact with each other, and can even interact with other applications of the fediverse (like mastodon, which is more similar to twitter).
Because everyone can make their own Lemmy instance, it is also possible for bad faith actors to make one. They could create many accounts on their own instance, and try to mess with the other Lemmy instances by either posting a lot of comments, reporting a lot of content, or a number of other things. To prevent that from being an actual issue, each instance has the option to >defederate< other instances. (I am not 100% sure on the following so please correct me if I'm wrong) Defederating means that users of instance A cannot interact with the content or users of instance B, if instance A defederated instance B.
Since the performance of website is dependent on the instance you use, you can try to find another instance with less users and a more stable server. As long as it is not defederated by many other servers it will be effectively be the same experience as being on another instance.
Could I think of the federation as like nations giving each others' citizens a visa, or is that too off the mark to use as a metaphor?
I think it's too far off. It's more like countries joining European Union - they are still individual countries, but they share stuff with all other countries that are part of the union/federation.
I think it kinda works, but it misses the mark in that you don't need to 'travel' to another server to see the communities and posts from that server.
It's more like every instance is a post office, and when you make a post or comment at your local post office, they also send it out to a bunch of other post offices. So when you rock up to your local post office (instance), you can see all the activity at that post office, but also all the activity that has come in from federated post offices.
The top three instances a currently overcrowded. I recommend checking out a smaller instance (for example https://laguna.chat).
Smaller instances are still able to access to same content. But it is just a different server that processes the content.
But are they ? I posted a comment a couple of days ago via lemmy.world on a 'remotely hosted' community, and then viewed the same post via its 'native' instance, and my comment never showed up, even days later.
There are some issues regarding sync. If an instance is not reachable when an action is synced (e.g. due to overloaded servers), the sync is never attempted again and the instances will stay out of sync.
I love that your first instinct after being here just a few hours is to bitch about things. Maybe donate and thank the devs for the free work they're doing so you don't have to deal with the bullshit on Reddit, and then in a month or so when the user influx has calmed down a bit, then you can bitch if you want.
Did you think redditors will stop moaning just cause they are in a new place? Bitching is universal as long as three or more people can gather around on some corner of the internet.