[Meta] Could we move the community to another instance to ease the load on Lemmy.world?

Bl4ze@lemmy.worldmod to [Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation@lemmy.world – 66 points –

Tl:dr: would you be okay to migrate the community to another instance for better performance? The change for you would just be one click to subscribe to the new community on the new instance.

Hello everyone,

As you may have noticed, there have recently been issues with instances located far geographically (i.e. Australia) to stay synced with LW since they switched to 0.19.3.

What is the issue?

Since Lemmy version 0.19, which LW updated to recently, management of requests between server has changed, potentially leading to some instances losing synchronization, especially if there is a lot of physical distance between them.

Among the impacted instances:

  • reddthat.com
  • aussie.zone
  • lemmy.nz
  • lemdro.id

Some other instances were affected in the past, such as lemmy.blahaj.zone (see their dedicated post https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/9871961)

A graph can be seen here, the number represent activities (votes, comments, posts) that are queued to be send to the instances. The number was growing because LW can not process the activities fast enough

More details can be found here:

There was also another thread detailing the centralization of active communities on LW: https://lemmy.world/post/13059576

Having most the active communities of Lemmy on one single instance can create this kind of scaling issues, which prevents some instances to stay synchronized and interact with the rest of the Fediverse. At the time of this post, Reddthat, but also Lemmy.nz, Lemdro.id and Aussie.zone are between 400.000 and 2 millions actions behind LW (https://phiresky.github.io/lemmy-federation-state/site?domain=lemmy.world).

Please note that while there are a lot of actions that are pending from LW to some servers, most of the federation between servers still happens instantly. LW is in a kind of unique position due to how many active communities and members they host.

The Lemmy code will probably be reworked to solve this issue in the future, but there is still actions we can take now to mitigate the issue.

What can we do to help with this matter? Migrate!

We discussed it within the moderation team, and we wanted to suggest you, our members, to move the community to Lemm.ee, as they are the second biggest instance, but are still able to process all actions under 1 minute on average:

That would at least solve the federation issue for our community, and members from those instances would be able to interact with it. Long term fix would require a rework of the Lemmy codebase, but that's out of scope of our proposal.

This is how we would proceed:

  • asking community for feedback (that's where we are now).
  • if the community agrees, go to the next steps
  • create another post to redirect people to the new community (probably locking the previous community temporarily to ensure that people would go to the new one) on the new instance
  • create a few posts on the new instances to ensure that the migration has been completed

What would that change for you?

If we indeed decide to migrate, you would just have to subscribe to the new community, and that would be it.

Your choice

Would you be okay with this? Feel free to share your feedback on the comments. For people who just want do give their feedback without having to comment, I will add two comments with potential opinions to choose from.

We will keep the thread open for at least 5 days (so until next Wednesday), with a potential extension if needed.

Thank you for reading everything, and see you in the comments.

19

I agree with migrating the !casualconversation community to lemm.ee

I would like to keep the !casualconversation community on lemmy.world

lemm.ee for the win! I don’t mind moving communities, as long as there’s a general announcement somewhere so I don’t forget to subscribe to the new one.

Agreed. Migration is no problem, that's the strength of the fediverse, right?. Communication is the most important factor!

You will lose people that don't check Lemmy regularly and don't see the migration post (and don't visit the community directly).

I assume you will lock the existing community to force the move and stop double posting?

Yes

create another post to redirect people to the new community (probably locking the previous community temporarily to ensure that people would go to the new one) on the new instance

Why only temporarily though?

It could be permanent, I said temporary because we could always reevaluate after a few weeks.

I was just thinking about when !android@lemmy.world got locked because !android@lemdro.id was created, and then people complained that they wanted both to coexist.

I guess if once the vote is done, the 13 or so people who want to keep in on LW want to be able to reopen it once the migration is over, that could be discussed.

I agree with migrating the !casualconversation community to lemm.ee

It concerns me the volume of communities and even users on LW, so I'm totally on board with us spreading some of the load by the way of migrating to another instance.

Hopefully it won't be a difficult process.

I would like to move the !casualconversation community to another instance (detail in comments)

How does one migrate a community?

Basically, create a new one one the new instance, and tell everyone to move there.

Posts will be kept on the old community, but due to the nature of this community, it shouldn't be an issue. People are mostly busy with current topics, I don't really see people coming back often to old posts about what everyone was doing on their week-end a few months ago.

Is there a way to shut down or loudly announce the move for new posters? Like changing the name of the community?

When searching for a new community, I hate when I see 3 or 4 versions of the same topic and I just pick one at random. Uncertain if I'm part of a dead one or not.

Yes

create another post to redirect people to the new community (probably locking the previous community temporarily to ensure that people would go to the new one) on the new instance

We can indeed also rename the community while it is locked to make sure that people get the message.

Moving is likely fine, though it would be interesting if you could track as many metrics as possible for this migration.

There are a lot of suggestions for handling moving content or for separating content from instances, etc, in the fediverse. So it might be helpful to show how this type of unsupported migration effort works and if it has a big impact on things like post counts, existing and new subscribers, etc.

It could help with priorities. Maybe, I dunno.