I’ve gone and made accounts of a handful of Lemmy instances, all of them larger, more popular ones.
… and I can’t access any of them directly today, likely due to the influx of users from Reddit.
Programming.dev is alive and well though.
I’m a software engineer by trade but I figured the instance call programming.dev would most likely be run by someone who knew what they were doing when it came to running a lemmy instance and would most likely be the most stable. :P
Same exact boat, and also assumed if there were going to be any difficulties scaling this would probably be the best community able to tackle it lol
I had a bit of trouble joining with multiple refreshes needed, but it worked in the end and I’m here finally. Been lurking but decided it was time to join and get the numbers up.
This is 4D chess right here. I didn’t consider this when signing up.
Lemmy.world is ran by a pro. Dude runs one of the most used mastodon instances. The fact that Programming.dev is stable while .world is not quite so, is purely due to the amount of users. Get 80k on this instance and you will see what happens…
I mean it’s happening already right now. I think, especially right now (reddit migration etc.), it would be better to get a really beefy server until the dust settles, and then adjust the hardware accordingly with a little bit of room for more load in the future.
I don’t think the scale of what is happening at lemmy.world resembles what is happening on programming.dev. lemmy.world has 82k users. programming.dev has 4.4k. Hopefully more general instances are created, because it seems like people general instances as opposed instances such as mander.xyz and programming.dev. The beauty of decentralization is not being used to its full potential atm, I think.
Maybe I was misunderstood: I mean right now programming.dev seems to have scale issues as well. I’m totally for decentralization, but I think decentralization should happen on a per-topic/community level, so that we don’t have gazillion /c/programming communities spread across multiple instances (at least until there is a good solution for somehow grouping communities across instances). And I think one instance should handle at least a few thousand maybe > 100k at least somehow active users (lemmy isn’t a p2p network after all…), which I think should be possible right now with a beefy server.
Same reason why I joined.
Man, this place definately has the vibe of an old timey BB forum. You recognise people in your replies like you used to. I find that I’m gawking at stats way less and I’m able to just talk to people. Engagement is way less, but maybe that’s a good thing.
It’s so refreshing. It feels like the old internet
It really does feel like the old web again to a certain extent. I hope this “age of enshittification” leads to a throwback to the old web but I’m not convinced it will happen. I feel like Lemmy (and other federation platforms) are definitely our best shot at it :)
Anyway, happy to be here :)
I would much rather have fewer more engaging conversations than the circus Reddit was. Sure it had more conversation but sometimes that felt more isolating since every comment became transactional noise. Really hoping I can find the sweet spot on Lemmy!
I certainly don’t miss every thread turning into bots arguing with each other about politics
There’s a Lemmy frontend that fully emulates a phpBB board. It’s kind of amazing.
Seeing this just felt like unlocking a bunch of core memories.
You recognise people in your replies like you used to.
This is pretty cool. I’m still active on some older traditional forums, but I love this style of threaded discussions in comment trees here. So much easier to reply to an individual in wall-of-text discussions. I think we’ll also start recognizing each other by account birthdays, with a wave of folks all having similar ones in June and July. 📅
Ah, I wish I didn’t listen to those people saying that signing up to the fediverse was going to be complicated, then I would have synced my account creation date with my birthday.
old timey BB forum
That’s why I have the Netscape profile pic lol
Wait you can use gifs as the avatar? Oh yeah!
I have no idea, this is technically a webp file I had on my computer from God knows where. I’m always nervous bringing attention to it because I don’t want the Lemmy UI devs to find out and think it is a bug lol.
I came across this community, which it reminded me of your choice of avatar, and figured you’d be interested:
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Ya know; perfect time to shout out the admins here. Thanks for this little terrific instance. I have an account on BeeHaw, I just never leave here.
No drama, just polls about icons. Easy.
Programming.dev with local filter is a good replacement for /r/programming for me. I am loving it here.
And it doesn’t have all of the shitty low effort self promotion articles (yet)!
Hang on, I need to plagiarize a guide for setting up React and Redux and put it on my blog and pretend it’s mine for job hopping optimization and internet street cred…
Make sure said guide finds its way to LinkedIn and Medium.com please.
This setup is also my new “front page” and it’s awesome. This community is developing really well.
Glad you are enjoying it, though to be honest I do hope this grows to be a decently sized programming community. A lot of the threads are quite dead currently.
IMO for being a niche instance (programming) on a niche platform (Lemmy) it is doing extremely well. Thank you!
I never really understood what’s appealing about participating in a community with gazillions of users where any attempt to have a conversation is buried under thousands of replies. Not even talking about the amount of trolling or aggressive commenters.
I think smaller places suit me better, and I am grateful that smaller instances like this one have emerged as a result of the latest happenings with Reddit.
I find I like having both.
Smaller communities / more quiet threads where I really participate and get in a conversation with people. Other times I just like having a lot of different threads with a lot of different information etc.
Agreed! For me right now what reddit has but Lemmy hasn’t replaced is the local/certain kinds of obscure that was on Reddit.
As a practical example, there isn’t a great soccer forum, much less my hometown team. There’s gaming but my nerdy deep lore destiny 2 sub hasn’t made it over here yet.
So far I’ve been getting by on news feeds and mastodon repost bots but I’m definitely missing some of the content from the old site. A natural response is to stand up my own, but being realistic most people just don’t have time to run a community, create content for it, and enjoy it. Reddit had a model that allowed occasional interaction with regular consumption due to its huge scale. So far that’s still not here.
Glad I’m not the only one that feels that way.
One interesting thing I read somewhere on here was a recommendation to use Lemmy first, and then if you feel like your missing something, go to Reddit.
I think I’ll be doing that for the meantime.
There’s an appeal to having limitless content, but it does become addictive. Having a slower pace is a good thing.
I left Reddit shortly after the spez’s AMA before I found Lemmy and for a week I did feel a little out of touch since I didn’t like the feeds on other social networks or sites. Lemmy gives me that feeling of being up to date with the internet without being endless which I think is much healthier.
There’s an appeal to having limitless content, but it does become addictive. Having a slower pace is a good thing.
You know that’s a great point I hadn’t considered…
Yep, though federation syncing is really slowing down. This post from [email protected] is at 44 comments from programming.dev but 112 comments on the beehaw instance.
So the “true” state of a post is always in it’s instance of origin
No, federation is directional, so even if everything synced perfectly and instantly it wouldn’t be the true version. Take this example. There is an instance that is federated with no one, but every instance is federated with it. Every other instance would see everything there but the instance it is hosted on wouldn’t see any. There’s no reason to say the version hosted there is the true one when it lacks so much of the conversation.
Also comments can lag when syncing to the main instance in the same way they can lag coming from the main one. All you can really say is that when viewing a post on an instance it has the true version of all of that instance’s users comments.
Thank you! Really easy to understand
Let me ask you another question, where are my comments stored? Are they only in my instance or are they elsewhere too?
Lets say i comment on a post from my instance, if someone from another instance sees the post will il be replicated in their instances database?
What if i comment on another instances post? Will my comment be stored in the other instance database or in mine?
What if i delete a comment/post? Am i guaranteed in Will be deleted everywhere?
My understanding is that everything you do is first stored on your instance and then makes its way to instances that are federated with yours. I’m not sure about the specifics of it or deletion though. I haven’t doved into the spec. Because it is called ActivityPub I bet it is the “pubsub” (publisher subscriber) pattern where other instances subscribe (federate) to be published to but it might not work like that.
This is why when you’re the first user on an instance to subscribe to a community from another instance that no one on your instance has subscribed to yet it is somewhat more of an involved process because your instance was not getting anything from that community before and needs to start. I’m still new to this myself and basing it off stuff I’ve read people say who may also be wrong themselves though.
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I guess that’s because Beehaw is still 17.4?
I think the fediverse will function the best if everyone is split across many instances. As soon as one or several become dominant, the way they do things becomes the norm, for good or bad. That and the server load of course.
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Does it make that much of a difference which instance you’re on? I created an account here, but I’m subscribed to communities across the entire fediverse. Defederation can of course come into play, but unless you create an account in each instance that fits your interests I don’t see it making too much of a difference where your account has its home.
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Yeah. The need here is for people to distribute across instances so the load is evened out. I’m still on the fence about what I think about the distribution being “interest”-based (there’s of course the Local filter which I haven’t used that much yet). I’m sure it’ll grow in me 🙂
Could you explain a bit more? I am new to lemmy (reddit exile) and I thought the instances are like servers and they communicate between each other.
What do you mean by instance that fits your interest?
Thanks.
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The problem is most people are confused and overwhelmed by all the instance business to begin with.
It’s a UX thing. Users can’t be expected to read up on all the technical details of instances and the pros and cons of different ones before signing up. I don’t know how it’d work exactly, but they really need a nice and simple “sign up” page that they don’t need to think about.
Maybe a list of all the decent instances to use - meaning pretty much all instances that are not catered to a specific niche, open to new users and don’t have any defederation drama ongoing - and then a global lemmy signup page can just randomly assign new users to one of those instances.
I cannot explain the exact details but I remember during the first great Twitter exodus some people discovered a drawback in the ActivityPup protocol that seems to cause performance issues when very influencial users post on a small/under powered instance.
Because communicating all that stuff to many other instances is more costly than spreading it only to people on the same instance. So technically speaking large instances have a performance advantage and must just scale accordingly to the user number.
Everyone agreed that this need to change in oder to ensure a healthy federated ecosystem but I don’t think it was be fixed by now.
Yes, it definitely provides opportunity for bad actors to control Lemmy.
If reddit wanted to they could offer the admins of beehaw, sh.it.just.works, and lemmy.world money for control of the servers and then if accepted defederate the three largest instances from everywhere else, basically killing Lemmy or at least severely hindering it’s growth.
I am noticing a lot of comments from lemmy.world communities can’t be seen from my other accounts like lemmy.ca or programming.dev.
Aside from that, I think it’s nice to be on a smaller instance.
I can’t even access the lemmy.world instance. It just always errors out for me.
But I like the idea of smaller servers that specialize in a specific hobby/interest/topic and then all the /c/ communities can be centred around that topic and moderated appropriately. I think it leads to better discussion between people looking for programming topics.
How is it going for you today? A couple of days back the dev was having issues attempting to update the servers to the latest lemmy release, and it was causing some issues interfacing with other instances and using apps. Should be fixed now.
Hey there /u/[email protected], sorry for the late response. You’re correct. It seems I no longer have any issue with accessing that lemmy instance anymore.
I read earlier that users and posts from
lemmy.worldandsh.itjust.worksare not being properly loaded and displayed due to the user’s client instance de-federating from instances with problematic users.In other words, the behaviour of users in some instances has an effect on their reputation.
EDIT: (Maybe not. Not trying to kindle the fire of rivalry between Lemmy instances in here. Yet. * vsauce.wav here *)
Only Beehaw defederated. The problem today is that lemmy.world is upgrading to 18.1 and it hasn’t been going to smoothly. The server has been restarted a ton lately.
I thought that was just beehaw that defederated from a bunch of places?
This is my favorite place on the internet.
When will the first Lemmy instances permanently shut down again because of high resource usage/costs?
I was thinking if an instance owner cannot afford to keep upgrading servers, it could close its doors to new registrations. This will create a need for more instances and users will be more evenly distributed.
But it’s my understanding that resource usage will keep increasing even if you keep the number of users constant on a server (as more content is posted in the communities that users are subscribed to, and that content needs to be synced and stored).
That’s adding storage, which is comparatively cheap.
For more simultaneous users, you need more CPU/RAM. That’s where the monthly cost shoots up fast.
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If anything, this is the month where we’ll find out… A lot of medium/large instances have made the jump to dedi servers and keeping those up isn’t cheap
Happy to be federated with you, good sir.
this instance has been a beast, so solid
Not a member of programming.dev but i find it nice to be on a small homeserver too
Is there really such a big influx of users migrating specifically TODAY, of all days? I guessed most interested users, like us, did in advance these last 3-4 weeks.
I wish there was a way to see the traffic of different instances in (mostly) real time.
The 3rd party apps are shut down. We’re (You and I) are the “first movers” of this initial migration. Basically the choices are to move to the Reddit App, stop using anything like Reddit, or here… (ActivityPub like sites)
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That’s kinda weird how there are posts like that, though.
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