did we really just survive this?

AlmightySnoo 🐢🇮🇱🇺🇦@lemmy.world to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 770 points –
pixel.tchncs.de
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I am a very patient Apollo refugee. It may take many weeks for some servers to adapt to the ever-growing influx and for new apps to squash bugs and build out functionality. My body is ready. This is now home.

All we gotta do is be patient. It will work out fine, Lemmy has a lot of potential!

I want to believe, but who’s paying the hosting bills?

People! It’s open-source and community driven effort.

Lemmy is a software that can be hosted by anyone. So people just buy servers and run Lemmy instances on them. Of course, if a server has more members, it would require more hardware to run. So either upgrade the server to facilitate more users, or admins can stop the signup process.

People can also donate for maintenance of the server.

Each instance/server is being paid by the people that launched it / manage it. It's cheaper to have several smallish instances than a few big ones, so take your favourite server flavour and create the account there. You could also create a small aws container shielded by cloudflare and linked to S3 or whatever and create a server for you and friends, it should cost around 15 ish euros a month which can me a shared cost, idk. Or simply donate to the server you belong to, or don't, whatever floats your boat.

I subbed to the lemmy.world patreon a few weeks ago :) gotta help @Ruud pay for his experiment. It also helps to remember he only started this server on June 1st and the Lemmy code is under constant development as well.

A mixture of everybody. Right now the service is new, so people are being really good about donations. There are also contributions from charities like the OpenCollective which are meant to help the development of these FOSS communities. As we hit the six months or one-year mark we may see some instance owners attempt monetization as donations dry up, and I remember that my favorite app Boost served ads in the free version to fund development which its Lemmy version may continue to do, but as long as there's interest and community here the servers will stay up.

I joined Lemm.ee originally and then hopped to .world. Things took too long to load so here I am back to my original account

Edit: also using memmy and it has themes and gestures like Apollo and wefwef is also very Apollo like but I like memmy more

What app are you using for ee

All of the lemmy apps work for every lemmy instance! I'm using Liftoff right now, which is working well for me. I'm on Android. I've seen a lot of people recommend Wefwef for iPhone.

Just as a note, wefwef is a PWA so it also works on Android. It is said to be very similar to Apollo, so if you're on Android and are curious what Apollo was like feel free to give it a try.

I use memmy and dip into wefwef a bit but ultimately like memmy more. My parent comment won’t load so idr if I said I’m an Apollo refugee but both are very Apollo like with gestures and wefwef has Apollos subscription list but memmy feels like it has more polish. Plus lemmy has the theme I used on Apollo which is sunset

Fellow Apollo refugee here too! Lemmy will work! It must!

I’m proud of myself that I haven’t visited Reddit since Apollo went dark.

Same. It's just growing pains, but totally worth it.

2 more...

We are all lemmings now

Over the cliff I go

Someone said we should be lemmons and if there’s an award system it’s all lemons

I wouldn't mind awards coming back, they were a form of monetization on Reddit that I didn't really mind. If we do awards on Lemmy, I think it would be neat if we could pick one free award a day to give out (and let it be any icon), and I don't think awards should give Lemmy premium or any of that stuff, but I'm open to the idea in general.

I just hop over to another instance federated with lemmy.world so the content never stops. The fact that one instance can go down but the idea and collected communities remain up on others that are all connected together is tits, man.

Is there any advantage to being on a large instance?

The federated all feed will have more diversity. Knowing that, it becomes more important on a small instance to use things like lemmyverse.net to search out new communities to subscribe to, because they may not appear in your feed otherwise (unless the server owner uses a bot to subscribe to a bunch of communities). They are also more variable, how well they run is based on the technical knowledge of the admin and the type of hardware they're running on. However, when built well small instances will usually run a bit faster, be a bit more stable, and have a more close-knit community. Knowing all of that, I think which is better just depends on the priorities of the user. However, as a note, spreading the load over as many instances as possible increases redundancy and makes Lemmy more sustainable, so if you're on the fence I would say to join a small instance.

Running my own instance I haven't noticed any issues, I have however noticed a big uptick in engagement and that is nice to see, it doesn't feel so empty on here anymore!

It’s like some of y’all weren’t around for Reddit’s early days lol.

I'm a simple man who's been using RIF all these years.

I came over here to avoid the drama and start fresh. But somehow there is drama going on between something called beehaw and lemmy.world? What are instances? Are they servers? What or who is being defederated? Somehow I just joined but I'm shadowbanned cuz I registered on lemmy.world?

The text box bugs out and trying to type in a new line jumps to some random point in the previous line in Jerboa? Kinda wonky

I dunno I hope all this shit gets sorted out cuz I wanna settle so I hope all involved parties sort out this bs

Beehaw basically decided that some instances, including ours, are too unsafe for them and they wanted to preserve the "safest Lemmy instance on the internet" title so they needed this drama.

The thing though is that it's been weeks and most lemmings are pretty much unaffected by that, much larger communities have grown since then on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml (and also other specialized instances like programming.dev) and that drama is pretty much irrelevant today and just a historical hiccup and beehaw is just a small epsilon in the lemmyverse right now.

tl;dr: it pretty much doesn't affect you today, you can safely ignore beehaw's existence, or if you insist you can create your account in an instance that is still (at least for now) federated with beehaw.

Unsafe isn't the right way to put it. Lemmy, being so new, has limited admin tools, especially for cross instance interactions. They saw an unusually high number of bad posts from people in the biggest instances, which is frankly expected for being the biggest open instances. Since they didn't have a better way to deal with people not from their instance, they decided to just defederate from the biggest instances for now.

My understanding is that they don't like that "solution" and intend to refederate once there's better admin tools. They want to focus on providing a safe space and the it's not that the instances they blocked are unsafe, but that the people from those instances make it hard for beehaw to provide their desired safe space for their local instances. They don't want to change other instances. They just want to make their own communities higher quality.

Personally, I purposefully chose an instance that beehaw hasn't defederated cause their communities are very good. It's a shame they aren't accessible to most of the threadiverse.

instances are servers and communities are like subreddits, each server (instance) is basically like a small reddit but they talk to each other

as for beehaw and lemmy.world thing beehaw never wanted to be a reddit replacement, they wanted to do their own thing and were afraid that the huge influx of users coming from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world would cause moderation problems and decided to defederate (i think it was a bit of an extreme measure)

What are instances? Are they servers?

Yes, each instance hosts differents communities, like lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, but through federation they are able to communicate between each other. For their respective users, that means to be able to read, comment, post and vote in every community inside their instances.

But somehow there is drama going on between something called beehaw and lemmy.world?

Not really dramatic, lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works have a simple registration process, which means it can be very easy to sign up bots, beehaw prefers a more rigid sign up process, where they can better curate their community.

What or who is being defederated?

Beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works until all of them have better mod tools to deal with the sudden influx of users. Defederated means that users between them can't read new comments and posts, and vote in the other community, leaving only the post and comment copies that existed before the defederation.

Somehow I just joined but I'm shadowbanned cuz I registered on lemmy.world?

Servers were overloaded, the usual growing pains in a new plataform.

The text box bugs out and trying to type in a new line jumps to some random point in the previous line in Jerboa? Kinda wonky

I recommend Liftoff and wefwef instead. Jerboa is the Lemmy's creators side project, so it isn't their primary focus. wefwef is a progressive web app (PWA) so you might not find it the play/app store.

Appreciate the breakdown. I'll definitely try those other apps and see which one is the smoothest.

Beehaw is just... doing their own thing. They even removed down votes. Like Tildes, they have a specific vision of community and are going against the grain to cultivate it.

I can't say that I agree with Beehaw's direction and decision to defederate. But that's a feature of both Lemmy and Beehaw's vision of community. Some vocal minority of people are taking it too seriously because they are treating Lemmy as normal social media and perceiving this all as slights. We don't need to be tribalistic. And, if one does want to be tribalistic, they are free to go try and join one of the cut-off tribalistic instances like Beehaw. I have an account there and... it does feel different. Lemmy in general is calmer and more prone to high quality interactions. Beehaw is, too. But Beehaw is the "this is a Christian Minecraft server!!" of Lemmy at the moment.

I think it would be healthier if people stopped treating Lemmy as 1:1 Reddit replacement and instead as a local bbs with Reddit-like interface that can, not will, connect to other bbs using the same infrastructure.

Indeed. Beehaw is like a friendly cultivated forum site, that wants to let its users go out and interact with other similar forum sites. I think it's understandable that to create that curated experience they defederate from servers they think would harm it, every instance has its own approach to it. The instance I'm on, VLemmy, recently held a vote and decided to not defederate even with really shitty instances, instead opting to let users curate their own experience. To each their own, that's one of the great things about the decentralization of the Lemmy protocol, every server can do its own thing and users can join whichever they would like or host their own.

I just think of beehaw as its own individual site that happens to use Lemmy.

Like when all the different sites all had the same forum software, but it's not like they were connected or anything. Don't even think they could be connected.

Lemmy is just a convenient platform for them.

And that's fine. They have their advantages of a more private platform but the disadvantages of it never being as busy or popular as it would be while federated

Don't worry too much about such drama. This is all super new and still sorting itself out. Managing the huge amount of new users is a gigantic task for the admins of the big instances and of course also for the moderators here.

Everything is new and not "broken in" yet. Mod tools need to improve, captchas are not always enabled, ... The list is long but development is insanely fast right now.

I am quite excited about what will happen for the next month, because in the last 2 weeks things have changed quickly, the community grew and I could FEEL it getting bigger and better here!

I switched to lemm.ee just to be able to load anything haha. Liking the instance so far. Smaller user base so less load and the admin seems competent enough to keep it going strong based on their interaction with the community

Ssshhh... Don't give away our secret..jk This is how lemmy world got overloaded with users. Everyone recommending lemmy world should try recommending a list of smaller user base instances because now lemmy world has 70k + users and counting. Also there should be easier ways to just switch instances.. Or a master guide or something since many users are brand new here, just like me and don't know exactly how things work yet.

I agree. But one disadvantage of really tiny instances is the lack of confidence I have that the admins stay on top of keeping those instances up to date with the latest version of Lemmy. The older the version, the more the likelihood of bugs, performance issues, and potential security vulnerabilities.

Hopefully the Lemmy devs get motivated by this new influx of users that they start to incorporate features that extend the vision of decentralization where user accounts could be migrated to another instance without losing anything. That would mean whenever an instance gets hit with too much load, just switch it out with one that has less load on it and you are good to go ahead with your day.

It would be awesome if we have seamless integration between the lemmy instances, especially with data integrity and transfers from one instance to the other. I have faith that Lemmy will grow and have these advanced features... the devs are quite capable, we just have to be patient and support however we can.

@pyarra@vlemmy.net has done a really great job of keeping VLemmy up to date; I have faith they will continue to do so. The ability to switch instances is a tricky feature and is something the developers are working on, but from what I've heard it's challenging to know exactly how to handle it.

I'm on lemm.ee, best admin ever.

Yeah the admin helped me figure out this whole decentralized thing and some basic stuff about lemmy

Is that was was going on? I just kept getting under maintenance messages

it's likely redditors overloading the server and not a maintenance

Yeah this is one hell of a stress test. Hopefully some wealthy ex-redditors can spend what they used to put into Reddit gold towards donations to the Open Collective instead so they can expand the servers to keep up.

Lemmy.world got hammered with new users. We need to try to spread out the load. Lemmyverse.net shows all the instances. I have a good home now, but I actually used https://the-federation.info/platform/73 since I can sort instances by country to find one in my region.

That's gonna be hard to overcome. Human nature it going to cause a lot of incoming users to gravitate towards the largest instance instinctively. Hopefully .world is seeing an increase in donations to help with rising costs.

That's true, I was guilty of that myself initially. However once you come to understand how Lemmy works you realize that instance performance is more important than population. I think that's probably okay if users are just finding a place to start, but hopefully they can spread out to other instances once they get going.

Lemmy is still in the beta. But for that stage its still great :)

still get 502 gateway errors (the server is dying or dead) but it's definitely better now than 2 days ago

My alt account on lemmy.ca is doing fine, no slowdowns. Redd.that and lemmy.world were slow to the point of unuseability for most of the past 6 hours.

Find a different server. I've had no problems at all where I'm at. You don't all have to hop on the same one.

I'm a simple man who's been using RIF all these years.

I came over here to avoid the drama and start fresh. But somehow there is drama going on between something called beehaw and lemmy.world? What are instances? Are they servers? What or who is being defederated? Somehow I just joined but I'm shadowbanned cuz I registered on lemmy.world?

The text box bugs out and trying to type in a new line jumps to some random point in the previous line in Jerboa? Kinda wonky

I dunno I hope all this shit gets sorted out cuz I wanna settle so I hope all involved parties sorr out this bs

I've been using jerboa, but I downloaded wefwef web app thing and it's also pretty nice. Maybe give that a shot? Either way I think there are just ongoing server issues from the influx of users.

Don't worry too much about such drama. This is all super new and still sorting itself out. Managing the huge amount of new users is a gigantic task for the admins of the big instances and of course also for the moderators here.

Everything is new and not "broken in" yet. Mod tools need to improve, captchas are not always enabled, ... The list is long but development is insanely fast right now.

I am quite excited about what will happen for the next month, because in the last 2 weeks things have changed quickly, the community grew and I could FEEL it getting bigger and better here!

I think so. It strained every instance, but things are smoothing out and I think we're on the up and up.