This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.

However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.

You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
    3·
    1 year ago

    Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

    • Owning user accounts
    • Exclusively host communities
    • Serving local and remote users webpages and media
    • Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

    Because servers “own” the user accounts and communities it’s not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

    I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

    I guess it’s a bit too late for a redesign now… Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.

    • gnoop@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There’s the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.

    • ionhowto@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is really the only way distributed has a chance to work but you won’t have much power as a server owner to ban users and be an edge Lord. Maybe the next things that comes up will be a true distributed network that also has incentives for people to spin-up new instances when needed.

  • Bilb!@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m going to set up a general purpose instance tomorrow with the intention of handling a relatively large number of users. The main problem is choosing a domain!

  • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    @nutomic@lemmy.ml It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

  • lightrush@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.

  • ionhowto@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I use kbin too.

    New to this feedverse or how you call it.

    Why isn’t there one login that can post on all platforms and I have to signup on each separately?

    If there is, you’re not making it obvious I guess.

    • anders@rytter.me
      1·
      1 year ago

      @nutomic @ionhowto you dont have to sign up on multiple instances. if you want to comment a post on another instance, copy the url and paste in into the search field and then your current instance will fetch the post so you can comment on it.

      • ionhowto@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        What happens to the users of one instance when that instance is shut down or deleted? Searching for a url seems way too complicated. Can’t one subscribe to a server or sub category on a server?

        This I would really want it to work but it’s much worse to me than forums even.

  • Gecko@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.

    Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.

    Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative…

  • 777@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

  • hbar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?

      • jarfil@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s kind of wrong though, isn’t it? What about stuff like GDPR data exports? Users should be able to export their data, then import it into another instance, effectively migrating instances.

        • Packopus@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          You can on Mastodon, you just export your data, delete your account, create new account on another instance and upload your data and it’s like what you said!

          • jarfil@lemmy.mlEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            I know how to program, I also know how to wonder how many instances are running off the docker-compose with publicly exposed postgres… that would make import/export really easy, wouldn’t it? 🙄

            Anyway, would you say this isn’t the right place to discuss this stuff?

  • jarwinder@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    is it possible to move an existing profile to a new server, like on Mastodon? or I need to create a new one and “start over”?

    • Barbarian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Right now, there is no import/export. It’s a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I’ve been following all the optimization work they’ve been doing on github, I don’t know if they sleep). You’ll have to start over atm, sorry.

  • aksdb@feddit.deEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think lemmy will be bitten in the ass by not having considered clustering/horizontal scaling from the start. Federation alone as a scaling mechanism is only feasible for “nerds”. But if the network wants to grow, we will need a few scale-able large hosted instances. And if their only choice is to scale vertically, there will be a hard limit (unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^).

    Another downside of this design is: you can’t run it with high availability. If there’s only one process per instance, updating it will mean the whole instance is down. Sure, if all goes well this downtime is under a second. But if it doesn’t go well or if a migration is needed, this might quickly become hours.

    • federico3@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Indeed. If a big instance like lemmy.ml was to be shut down all the communities would be lost. This is simply not sustainable. Why would users put effort building a community if it could be gone at any time?

      • aksdb@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That however would be a different problem. A horizontally scaled instance would be able to cope with more users, but if it shuts down for monetary, personal, or whatever reason, it’s still down.

        Protecting a community from this is what the decentralized part is for. That is already in place.

        (Although there is a middle ground where you could design the system in a way that one instance is mirrored and load-balanced across different hosters. That would actually also be quite interesting to have. But that’s another layer of complexity on top.)

    • Neil@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Except (as far as I’m aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.

    • Barbarian@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.

      After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.

      EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.

  • TheYang@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml

    could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
    If so, would you mind setting a “goalpost” for the community to help lift the financial burden?