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
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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 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!
try mine.
Good for you. I’d been trying that for months with no success. Finally .world let me in last week.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.
What’s going on with beehaw? I’m a bit out of the loop.
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.
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.
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
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.
All you need are two tin cans joined by string.
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
No matter how you slice it the only reason anyone uses cloud services is to cut costs.
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?
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:
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!
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.
That’s because he wants all 55 million active users accessing his servers so he shove ads down their throats.
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
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.
I’m worried about the search function. Every post ever made?
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.
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
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.
Like the good old times
Would upvote but I keep getting server-side errors
That’s interesting but have you considered that Value <html> of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject?
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.
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.
Ngl. I am having fun.
It is nice honestly. I appreciate all of you that have joined. This is going to be fun!
Does the Narwhal bacon again?
Oh god
Only at midnight.
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.
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.
Or even simpler, a feature that lets you aggregate history, posts, comments and subscriptions from multiple instances in a transparent way.
Sort of a meta-account / fedacount that tells all Lemmy instances that accounts a, b, c, and d are all the same user.
Doesn’t that kind of go against the idea of federation? I don’t know if it’s worth compromising on.
aggregating so many different cats community into one feed is a dream🤩🐱.
Right now i subscribe to 5 different technology@<instances>, but if i could create a custom community set according to my preferences then i could see all those 5 in one layout, without breadmaking and other contents breaking them up. the choice now is all posts from all communities or only one specific community.
aggregating so many different cats community into one feed is a dream🤩🐱
I can completely understand that :)
Maybe an option to make your own collections of communities? A function on the client side where you can apply tags, or something like that?
Lemmy at least needs a feature like Mastodon to allow you to migrate your accounts to another instance.
