YSK: If you want faster and less buggy User experience, move to a smaller instance that is hosted close to you.

RecursiveDescent@discuss.tchncs.de to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 422 points –

I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.

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All fine and dandy, but don't just pick a random one close to you. Don't forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.

Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don't mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.

Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info

What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don't even require an email address to sign up.

At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren't ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn't say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.

My main concern would be instance longevity.

At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)

A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you're behind CG-NAT you don't get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don't think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.

My main concern would be instance longevity

This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?

I am aware of how a public facing IP address works, and how little information it does give, by itself. It is still a privacy concern, and can be used in conjunction with other data to launch social engineering attacks or to help narrow down other data.

Possibly, but you don't have to be an admin of the instance the user is on to get their IP if thats what you're trying to do.

The biggest issue is that you're giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?

You don't need to provide an email address to sign up at most of the big instances. I think lemmy.world is the exception. Even your instance lemmy.ca does not require an email address.

If you really want to provide one, you could use a service that does email forwarding. Some examples are https://simplelogin.io (owned by Proton Mail), and Firefox Relay (Owned by Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser). These both have free tiers. There is also https://duckduckgo.com/email/ from the people who make the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. That one I believe gives you unlimited new randomised email addresses for free. Very low attachment size limit but great for something like Lemmy.

You're right that you don't have to on most large instances, and that you can make burner email accounts if you have to.

But this post was simply about telling people to be careful of smaller, less known instances. The links you provided are excellent ways to protect yourself, even outside of Lemmy.

Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.

Close to you helps in general, it's not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.

Agreed that close helps in general but 200-300ms isn't really that noticeable unless it's something where latency is important. I'm also surprised that some of the larger instances aren't using Cloudflare for caching. If things like images etc... are cached all over the world then I doubt anyone would notice any speed issues.

300 ms is a lot for a website. It feels slow. Cloudflare could help with traffic but I think the main culprit here is the database.

Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as "preferably"

Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least

There are feature requests on the gethub for Lemmy to add the ability to move users and communities between instances. It comes up often enough it's just a question of how to implement it and when.

What do you mean? Why would you need to migrate your account?

In order to switch instances hosted on a different server, but keep your account history such as comments, votes, posts, saved posts, etc.

Only way to switch instances right now is to make a new account from scratch on that instance.

But you can still view and interact with all content on any federated instance so why would you need another account?

If you want to switch instances.

There's no guarantee your instance will be around forever, they are all created by random people across the world running their own servers at their own cost. People may get bored/too busy and move on, can't afford it anymore, etc.

Also no guarantee the same people will run the instance forever, could get sold/given to new admins who ruin it somehow.

Server could get overloaded with too many people/content and not maintained properly resulting in poor quality/speeds.

Lots of reasons you may need to switch instances, would be nice if you didn't lose 5 years worth of account history and be forced to make a new one.

I have already setup my main account with subscriptions I like and I would ideally liked to keep my posts / comments..?

I second this request, I've created at least 5 accounts in different instances since I migrated.

Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?

For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!

I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.

The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it's easier to search. The instances also aren't 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.

Yeah, that will be nice if you can migrate your name to other instances... Cheers!

I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.

https://thelemmy.club

You'll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I'll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)

Was here thinking, couldn't I host my own instance for my own usage?

Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.

I know this may not be popular but I may only host to myself. I have a VPS for my personal website and other projects that has some free processing power available (its a Hetzner ARM VPS, the cheapest), so I also need to figure out if Lemmy runs on ARM SoCs. I figure it must run since some people may try to run it on RPIs.

It's absolutely your right to do so

From what I understand about Lemmy, the only way to disable signups completely is by defederating. Meaning, you would not be able to view other communities from other Lemmy instances like .world or beehaw.

To get around this, you can switch to application signup like beehaw and just ignore/reject every application but this would also mean that anyone can view your instance as a guest. Like you can go to lemmy.world and view posts and comments without logging in

Atleast, that's what I understand. Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

You can't disable registrations from what I'm understanding but you can make them pending some approval. So in my case I'd just ignore any registration done.

How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?

You can click the "use map" button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can't find a instance that you like that is close don't worry. Because server closeness doesn't matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.

Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.

Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!

From the map, there are 21 fediverse servers in Taiwan but none of them are Lemmy. There are even fewer in China (only 4 based on this map if I select "All" in the option).

AFAIK there aren't any Chinese language content about Lemmy yet.

The center of Fediverse of Asia seems to be Singapore and Tokyo.

Also how can I know which servers are federated\defederated to most of the Lemmy instances?

Servers are federated by default so unless it has been defederated by big instances you will have no problems. Important thing is instance you are joining having captcha/email verification because the ones without is suspectible to bot sign ups. So big instance might defederate with them to prevent bot attacks

Can you create Lemmy accounts on Mastodon servers?

Yeah this doesn’t show lemmy instances? Only mastodon and other weird shit.

If you go to the drop down menu at the top, you can specify what you are looking for. Select "all" and Lemmy will be on the list.

Do you have any advice on how to find one? Especially the “local to you” part?

You can check this list and find an instance hosted in/close to your country.

Useful. From this I find my instance is hosted in Russia. I should probably find another one closer to me

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.

I'm hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I'm open to a few public users.

Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.

So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)

added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too

Can you elaborate?

Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can't moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.

They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can't find it at the moment.

Is moving instances a thing or would you need to sign up from scratch?

AFAIK you need to sign up from scratch. But I'm pretty sure Lemmy devs will work on that. It's already a thing on Mastodon.

Currently Lemmy doesn't support account migrating but it is technically possible afaik. It might get added in future but currently you have to sing up from sracth. Hovewer I would say having a Lemmy.world account in addition is probably a good call.

Yes, I just made the switch to a closer instance yesterday. So much faster. I was on lemmy.world for the past few weeks but then I realized the server is hosted in Europe and I was getting 144ms ping from US east coast. This new instance I'm on, I'm getting 22ms ping.

You can test latency yourself from cmd by typing "ping lemmy.world" for example

Won't you see limited posts?

Not if they're federated to the larger instances, which they are by default. I think maybe you need to search an instance to start if no one from your instance has searched for the other instance yet, but idk, don't quote me on that

As far as I know, once instance and either see all its own communities and all other instance's. So should be fine and you wouldn't be causing load on instances used by people who dont have enough knowledge to host.

Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat

In what way is it more GDPR ready than other instances? I assume it uses the same server software?

By having an actual policy. That lists the usage of data, 3rd parties and the responsibilities of the instance owner.

Could an instance be hosted inside an app? In a container locally on your own machine? Maybe the two could be synced? One instance across all your devices synced?

That would be the safest?

As I understand it, you can host your own instance off a personal server, and use that as your "home" instance.

this post made me move instances and i am glad that i did, thanks!

I'm having trouble understanding how this works. If i create a community on a different instance, why can't i find it here, even when i have the switch set to all? Do they only sync on certain times of the day? Also when i delete a community (that i created by accident) why does it not disappear?

Federation happens gradually and changes are usually not visible everywhere at the same time. Using a fully qualified name (or an URL like https://lemmy.world/c/community@instance) you should be able to access your new community though.

I signed on to lemmy.world in June as that seemed like The Place, but now I'm thinking of switching to a lesser populated instance. I still haven't found an instance that I like enough to switch to though. Right now, even with the performance issues, lemmy.world still feels like the most suitable instance for me.

You still need an extra acc onthebig ones if you want to usethe apps though. Not all instances are supported.

Which app have you been struggling with? Both Jerboa and Connect worked fine with different servers for me, I'm guessing others are fine too

? On all Lemmy apps I've used, you can just type the URL for the Lemmy instance your account is on, even if it's not on the "default" list.