Hey Lemmy's pretty solid now, thanks devs!

errer@lemmy.world to Lemmy@lemmy.ml – 796 points –

A few weeks ago Lemmy was buggy on computers and there were no good mobile clients out there, now on PC the site is pretty stable and fast, and there are now some pretty good iOS/Android clients too. Thanks to all the people who made this possible!

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Yeah, it's amazing how quickly things have improved amid a massive influx of new users! Truly impressive!

I'm really enjoying Jerboa. It stays lightweight and fast!

I have also been loving Jerboa.

I would really appreciate the ability to display thumbnails on the left side though.

I've been on Jerboa as well. Reminds me of Boost, took no time at all to figure out.

The only thing I'm missing in jerboa - is there a way to set my comments default sort? Seems to default to hot and idk how to change it. Thankyawww

As someone who has been here for quite some time before the reddit exodus, it is crazy how much this place has improved in such a short time. I used to check lemmy once or maybe twice a day and then I'd go back to reddit. Now with all the new people posting here, lemmy has replaced reddit for me

I joined too early and stopped looking as there was so little content. In fact, when Lemmy started becoming well-known, I forgot I even had an account and made a new one elsewhere. Luckily, my password manager has a better memory!

Now if only my upvotes would go through. Hopefully the patch that was applied to lemmy.world yesterday addresses that. Their instance seems much more stable and responsive now.

I think the whole Fediverse is struggling with Reddit and Twitter sending a lot of new users their way.

It's struggling less than my RiF app though.

Yup, I joined in 2021 too and it was a ghost town. Just seeing hundreds of comments on posts is a shock.

Yeah, nearly three years ago when I first saw Lemmy I found the idea so cool but I didn't expect people not interested in fun rust projects to actually come here. And here we are now with an active platform with a wide variety of users !

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Thanks spez! You sent all the best devs making free programs for your platform to your biggest competitor, plus enough users for it to reach critical mass and allow the snowball effect to grow. And it's FOSS so it can't be stopped!

As a very new user, not one too tech savvy either, having constant improvements over the short time I've been here is so refreshing to see! Still getting my head around some of the navigational aspects, but Wefwef has been a blast to use.

Thank you Devs, this is truly a labour of love.

Donate if you want to keep it alive and improving!

Donate to the Lemmy project, but also look at donating to your instance / instance admin. It ain't free to host and operate this stuff.

They're the same for me because my account is 2 years old when lemmy.ml was the only instance with the bare minimum activity!

And remember that even a Euro per month is enough. It doesn't sound like a lot but if enough people donate just a little, it can grow to a pretty good amount of money.

Where can I go to donate to the Lemmy.World instance?

It just needs horizontal so that you could throw more servers at an instance and improve performance.

At some point a single community will be so active that one server won't be enough , it's better not to split it just so that it will be easier for the software.

I'd argue the exact opposite. We should strive for more instances and for Lemmy's userbase to be spread around. The fact that is scaling out (more instances) is easier than scaling up (beefier servers) is a feature, not a bug.

It's not exactly something that you can force. If X amount of users want to join an instance Y, the instance should be able to provide capabilities to host those users. Besides, horizontal scaling provides other benefits, stability is the main one - if one server instance goes down, others can immediately pick up the slack.

Lemmy.ml did exactly that and is one reason why lemmy.world got to be that big.

Once the server capacity is reached the instance should be closed and people will just go to another one.

I don't understand why people feel so happy about lemmy.world being ahead of the rest. It's against the point of the fediverse and has risks: the instance can be sold, can make decisions to put advertisement etc. It's like people didn't really understand what was wrong with reddit to begin with and how the fediverse tries to be different.

the instance should be able to provide capabilities to host those users.

Why? And who pays for that?

Why not? I don't see the drawback to develop ability to do horizontal scaling. If the instance owner doesn't want to add additional servers, it's up to them. Obviously they paid for it if they decide to add.

Just to be clear, horizontal scaling means multiple servers handling same instance, it can be the backend service to allow handling more traffics, or multiple db to reduce database loads.

Additionally it allows high availabilities, so if one of the backend service is down (either unexpectedly or do rolling update) the other service can still active so the instance can still be accessed by users

Why not?

  • Because it creates an unnecessary incentive re-centralize the social network under a handful of instances

  • Because it leads to drama and power struggles (beehaw defederating from other big instances, claiming issues with moderation)

  • Because after a certain size, there is no real community, no common identity, no shared values and principles.

  • Because it makes the system (the fediverse) more vulnerable.

  • Because it is not sustainable in the long run

  • Because it is not needed. Even if one server has an incredibly popular community, it can be followed from remote instances.

All of your points only considers the community itself, which is not my argument.

I'm mostly approach this from technical standpoint. It's impossible to have 100% uptime if there's no horizontal scaling capability. For example on updating version, currently the instance will need to shut down for maintenance until it's finished and usually there's still some issue to fix. If horizontal scaling exist, the instance can update server (or add additional one), move the traffic a bit to test it, and then fully rollout if everything going well.

Not to mention a hardware failure, which could take a couple of hours to fix at least, some mental health communities should stay online at all time, someone mentioned there is research showing when a person is suicidal there are a couple of hours he is vulnerable, and there is some research showing online support can improve mental health.

Dude, I think you're just ignorant of how web hosting works. Every single site you visit is hosted on probably dozens or more servers so that it can load balance or guarantee better uptime. It's normal. It's weird to be in a place that is only on one server.

Being able to host a stable site doesn't mean everything is suddenly moving into one instance either. The NBA subreddit for example, a single community, has millions of members. Lemmy can't handle anything like that. And technologically having no way to support large communities is a guaranteed way to kill your app.

You also seem to be very in favor of spreading out and decentralizing.... except for Beehaw. Wonder why you're such a purist for decentralization except in this case. Weird. Being able to defederate, make moderation decisions for yourself, and making big decisions like that to defend your community is the whole point of these sites. Maybe you should go back to Reddit if you aren't able to handle it. And for the record, you'd have to be blind to not see moderation controls are lacking at best for this brand new actively being developed site.

Dude, I think you’re just ignorant of how web hosting works.

I run a managed hosting service for Mastodon and Lemmy, but yeah...

Every single site you visit is hosted on probably dozens or more servers so that it can load balance or guarantee better uptime.

Hacker News: one single FreeBSD box. Not even a database.

Also, your cargo-cult is showing... talking about "load balance" as a guarantee of uptime is the same as justifying using Mongo because it is webscale

You sound like an old script kiddie who says they're a hacker cause they ran a script from a forum. If it wasn't obvious, I'm talking about actual web architecture. Not hobby junk. Managing to standup a tiny virtual instance for a few people does not mean that you understand anything.

As I said, this I basic architecture shit. Like, an intern would understand the idea kinda basic.

talking about "load balance" as a guarantee of uptime is the same as justifying using Mongo because it is we scale

???? Are you unironically implying that a site with a backend that has multiple servers stood up to spread the load won't have tremendously better capacity, redundancy, and as a result better uptime than a single hobby pc in your living room or whatever you have setup?

Can you please stop with the unnecessary snark and this silly attempt at dick-measuring? Are you upset at something?

Are you unironically implying that a site with a backend that has multiple servers stood up to spread the load won’t have tremendously better capacity, redundancy...

No. I am saying that the majority of websites out there don't need to pay the costs or worry about this.

Good engineering is about understanding trade-offs. We can be talking all day about the different strategies to have 4, 5 or 6 nines of availability, but all that would be pointless if the conversation is not anchored in how much will be the cost of implementing and operating such a solution.

Lemmy - like all other social media software - does not need that. There is nothing critical about it. No one dies if the server goes offline for a couple of minutes in the month. No business will stop making money if we take the database down to do a migration instead of using blue-green deployments. Even the busiest instances are not seeing enough load to warrant more servers and are able to scale by simply (1) fine-tuning the database (which is the real bottleneck) and (2) launching more processes.

Anyone that is criticizing Lemmy because "it can not scale out" is either talking out of their ass or a bad engineer. Possibly both.

Lemm.ee has horizontal scaling, and afaik it's the only lemmy instance to have added it. He has a sticky on meta@lemm.ee that talks about how he's using a half dozen different servers to split the load, although there's a few services that can't be split like image caching, so they just get their own server. I think the changes are being pulled into future updates so hopefully other lemmy instances can start doing the same

Developers have been kicking into overdrive to smooth things out. Web UIs are improving in stability under load, and apps like Wefwef are performing great. Each day people participate, donate, bug report, and audit code, is another day that Lemmy improves its rigidity.

Hell yes. Desktop web interface is solid. Jerboa on Android is solid. Now I'm just working on breaking the habit of typing old.reddit.com while waiting for things during the day...

you can use https://mlmym.org/ if you want to use lemmy with old.reddit interface

Lemmy is different than Reddit, and that's a good thing. I don't need to replicate Reddit. My problem is just the muscle memory habit of opening a tab and typing in o l d . And hitting enter when it autocompletes

That's cool, but sadly the inbox doesn't work right. You can't upvote or downvote a comment in it, nor can you see the context to figure out what comment of yours they're replying to. Hopefully that's something fixable in the future.

On my phone I've put the Jerboa icon where the Rif icon used to be and sure enough I now open Lemmy 100 times a day out of pure habit

If you use a private DNS such as adguard's or nextdns.io you could blacklist reddit to block it from your devices

I wish there was a simple toggle to make lemmy look like old reddit. Edit: I should have read the reply below first...

It’s amazing to think it has only been a few weeks and I still find it mind blowing how quickly everyone came together for all these projects.

Especially for the level of changes that have taken place. Lemmy basically had a major rewrite to move away from web sockets, and Lemmy.world's operators are running overtime just trying to fix the site up, and make it work for the massive amount of users that they have, addressing a few of the scaling issues in the process.

Quite literally by the hour I see app updates come in to pave over issues while at the same time developers are working directly with the big instance owners.

If that's not a labor of love for a platform you care about I don't know what is.

I remember when I'd refresh the front page and see posts from the day before. Now it seems like every few hours there's new content. This is a really happening place

Agreed! I'm currently hopping between Liftoff and Connect for my Android client right now, and it's hard to decide. Both are getting regular updates and they're just getting better! The race to improve is very exciting.

Sticking with Connect for the next few days though! Feels very good to use. Lots of customization.

Use Wefwef for mobile.

Use it for PC too 😉 Since it's a PWA (Progressive web application) it can be installed (as its own program) on any os with a compatible browser, including Windows, Linux and Mac.

Just not using Firefox...

I installed it via firefox mobile as a PWA and have no issues.

Literally does nothing for me... Any site with an official pwa doesn't install for me with FF on android.

Weird. Maybe you have removed some permissions or dosabled installing apps from unkown sources?

Nope just YT is so baked it it keeps taking over.

Edit: Wrong reply... Firefox has permissions, no idea. It works for non-pwa sites.

This is my main reason why I don't use Firefox. Well that and the absence of the extension manager add-on. I even adapted the layout to be the way I use my browser (through CSS) with hiding vertical tabs, much like edge.

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Wefwef is crushing it. 2+ updates everyday and improving quickly

100%

I've tried a few different apps and wefwwf is the best and most refined option at the moment. It's the closest feel to reddit that I've found so far.

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I hope at some point you can join a community on another server and see all posts, not be restricted to what gets posted from now on. Federated is great, but some way to make it transparent would be cool.

I think you might have a setting wrong. When I join a community on another server I see all of the posts including past ones.

Well, I have joined communities on other servers where I am the first to join. At that point, it shows up on my server and others on my server can also see it listed, but posts on my server to that group only get updated from the day I joined forward. That's what I meant.

I’m trying out Memmy right now and it seems like I can’t reply to comments, which seems pretty important to me, but other than that it’s good

Still some improvements need to be made but it's way more usable now than before 0.18.0.

I still get multiple JSON errors on every page I visit.

Try on another browser just to see

No thanks. Chromium isn't allowed on my networks. If it doesn't work on Firefox, it doesn't work.

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Liftoff on Android is very similar to RIF.

I am using connect and finding it very similar to RIF as well

I remember when reddit was a bug filled mess but it was the user community that made the site. That is happening here as well. We shall evolve beyond the limitations of reddit.

Solid for the last hour. It was buggy for the past weeks. Awesome