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.

  • Bilb!
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    6210 months 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!

  • Ruud
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    5010 months ago

    Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You’re welcome there.

  • @aksdb
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    5010 months 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.

    • @PriorProject@lemmy.world
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      1810 months ago

      I think you probably underestimate how far one can get with “vertical” scaling. Here’s the dockerfile: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/release/v0.17/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml

      • It includes 4 different containers… so there’s a way to scale out to 4 machines right away. Maybe not every container is doing an equal amount of work… but there’s some amount of immediately available machine-splitting.
      • I’m no expert, but I believe that at least the lemmy and lemmy-ui containers are stateless. If so, they’re horizontally scalable already.
      • Postgres then would likely be the main bottleneck. But postgres offers read-replicas, so again the write-load and the read-load can be hosted on separate machines. And if there’s enough read-load, you can have many replicas.

      Other comments from the admins have shown that lemmy.ml today is running on a single eight-core box and it’s currently hosting 30k registered users and over 1k active. So how much more compute capacity can we throw at “vertical” scaling on the current software architecture?

      • Just by going to a bigger single box, we can get 128 cores with no problem, a 16x bump in capacity. Does that get us to at least to 300k registered + 10k active?
      • Splitting the containers onto 4 separate machines. Does that get us 2x more?
      • Adding PG read-replicas and additional lemmy/lemm-ui containers would allow us to expand our instance footprint to maybe 6 physical machines should get us another 2x or more in performance.

      Conservatively, that’s 100x the computing capacity of the current hardware and could potentially support 1m registered users and 50k active. Now, I don’t REALLY expect this to be possible today, there will be many software bottlenecks found along the way to scaling a single instance this large. But my point is that there’s already a medium amount of horizontal scalability built into lemmy, and if the software doesn’t fall over for algorithmic reasons (which is will at first), the current infrastructure architecture allows quite a lot of growth. There’s plenty of time between now and a federation of million user instances to adopt a truly distributed storage backend if needed.

      • @aksdb
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        1310 months ago

        Doesn’t solve the availability issues, though. I know of no seriously hosted system that doesn’t have at least two replicas in different availability zones. I don’t expect any hobby instance to offer any kind of availability guarantee. But if we want to have one or two central instances that the typical reddit user can flock to, this would IMO be essential to have.

        Also, in my experience it is FAR cheaper to have a few low to mid range systems for vertical scaling, than to throw a high end machine at it for vertical scaling. If you look the the pricing, the monthly costs for vertical scaling goes up exponentially once you want much more RAM and CPU cores (and storage, and so on).

        Being able to scale horizontally solves both issues: hardware is cheaper and reliability is higher.

        That lemmy is so damn efficient would then simply mean, that we can achieve excessively good results with low resources, where Reddit would already struggly and needs to put much more machines in place. That would be a nice “business” advantage.

        • @PriorProject@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Doesn’t solve the availability issues, though. I know of no seriously hosted system that doesn’t have at least two replicas in different availability zones.

          I’m not sure why you think the setup I’ve described can’t have coverage in multiple availability zones. If the lemmy and lemmy-ui containers are stateless as I suspect, you can autoscale them. Pictrs is new to me, not sure there… but it appears to support object-storage which would likely make it stateless and the object-storage can replicate to multiple-az’s. Postgres read-replicas can be placed in multiple az’s as well. The only component that presents an issue is the Postgres write-leader, and failovers there can be done in minutes. Many many popular sites run with an infrastructure like this and achieve excellent uptimes.

          I do get the power of horizontal scalability, I specialize in distributed databases. But they come at a cost in flexibility relative to something like Postgres… and we’re very far from “needing” horizontally scaling database writes here. Everything else looks like it can be scaled horizontally if someone wants to take on the headache of doing so.

          • @aksdb
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            310 months ago

            Well, one could try to swap postgres for cockroachdb. But a ticket in github that asked for clustering support was closed with being out of scope. So might be lemmy is not stateless. Haven’t checked the code yet, though.

    • @federico3@lemmy.ml
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      1610 months 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
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        1210 months 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.)

        • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

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

          What? How is it solved exactly? If say lemmy.ml is down, what’s the point of other servers existing, if most of the content and users are here? Like, I created a few new communities on lemmy.ml, which don’t exist on say Beehaw because for some strange reason, the Beehaw admins don’t allow users to create communities. So how is going to Beehaw help me, if lemmy.ml is unavailable? Okay, so you tell me I should go to a different server then. Maybe even make a new server. Done and done. But there’s very few to zero users on that server, so those new communities and content created there might as well not exist. Also, even though Lemmy is federated, the homepage defaults to “local”, so all the new users coming in may miss out on all the other federated communities, and, if I’m reading this correctly, the federation isn’t even a fully automatic process, and some admins may even choose to put there server in a whitelist mode. All of it makes the whole “advantage” of federation, or at least Lemmy’s version of it, seem kind of pointless.

          It’s like saying, “Hey, Gmail is down so you should just use Hotmail instead.” Okay, so I can still send and receive emails, but I can’t access any of my old emails for context, and none of my contacts can reach me using my Gmail address, and none of my filters, address book and other content is available so I may not even be able to reach out to my contacts and let them know what my new email is.

          IMO the way the way the federation should’ve been designed is to use something like blockchain technology, so every instance basically has all the content and there’s only one source of truth for user accounts and data (distributed ledger), or maybe even just implement the whole thing as a plain old high-availability cluster with load balancing.

          Unless I’m missing something fundamental, I don’t see how this decentralization is of any use if the content isn’t there.

          • @federico3@lemmy.ml
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            1410 months ago

            If say lemmy.ml is down, what’s the point of other servers existing, if most of the content and users are here?

            There is no replication and failover so the problem is not solved.

            blockchain technology

            Urgh, no way. Replication and some basic message signing would be enough.

          • @aksdb
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            410 months ago

            What? How is it solved exactly? If say lemmy.ml is down, what’s the point of other servers existing, […]

            Because you want to rely on someone else’s instance. The idiomatic solution would be for a community to host their own lemmy/activitypub instance and join the federation. Then the community has control over their own data. In every sense. If they want to delete something (for breaching law, protocol, or whatever), they are free to do so and don’t have to ask anyone else.

            IMO the way the way the federation should’ve been designed is to use something like blockchain technology […]

            Please no. I mean there is IPFS out there that somewhat works like that, but I don’t really like that. First, the ever-growing amount of data means that every instance has to keep up with it. If they wouldn’t replicate it, the deletion of a single instance would still eliminate the data, even if there were references in a block-chain.

            Also: the ability to “forget” is important. Not everything needs to live on forever. That it currently does, can already be a big problem. Look how peoples lives got almost ruined because someone dug up tweets from 10 years ago that were stupid. Solving the issue of data ownership is IMO one of the bigger things we need to keep in mind when designing a better web. Federation with the ability to “just” bring your own instance along where you are the owner is one of these options.

            • @d3Xt3r@lemmy.ml
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              810 months ago

              Fair point, but my original point/issue still stands. The admin here is saying “lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead” and that advice isn’t really helpful, at least in the present state of things. Right now, we have an influx of novice users coming in from Reddit, and other servers either not accepting applications at the moment, or they are tooniche/specific (or inflexible, like Beehaw); finally at the moment, majority of the content is on lemmy.ml. So the end result is that lemmy.ml is one of the main viable servers.

              If people join some random server which doesn’t have the content they’re after, they’ll either lose interest, OR they may continue to consume the content on emmy.ml via federation, but then that’s not really going to solve the load issue since the content on lemmy.ml isn’t distributed/replicated.

              I understand your point of ever growing data and how it may be better if that data is transient and not there forever, but for a news aggregator and forum type social network like Reddit (and now Lemmy), data is everything. If that data isn’t available, or not going to available in the future, or will not be visible to audiences due to it being on some random server, it’s going to give content creators much incentive to create content, and no content == no users. This sort of model/thinking will be doomed to failure, or be forever relegated to niche/enthusiast status, where only niche communities will thrive on specific servers targeting that niche. Which I guess is the ultimate goal of federation where every topic/community has its own server? But to get there, you’ll need interested users, and to get users to be interested you need a stable, singular place you can point them to, where they can post content knowing. And maybe, as that server grows, the admin could start splitting off the larger communities into their own individual instances?

            • @solairusrising@lemmy.ml
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              310 months ago

              This is how I am understanding it. Please correct me if I am wrong.

              I’m going to use Reddit as an example, since we all understand that…

              So the way I understand this is that backbone is now the whole of the internet instead of just reddit.com.

              Each instance would be somewhat akin to a self-hosted subreddit. We can reach any sub from any other sub, since the backbone is now spread across the whole internet instead of just reddit.com.

              These subs (instances) are also like old style BB forums in that there can be different categories (communities) hosted by that instance, but those are also still visible across other instances.

              So basically people who are making communities here are making a sub in a sub (in Reddit terms).

              Do I have that correct?

              • @Parsnip8904@beehaw.org
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                210 months ago

                Mostly. I try to think of instance as not a subreddit but a loose collection of them, like a multireddit.

                What is kind of nice, in my understanding, is that text content is replicated across federated instances when a user is using both. So if you’re on beehaw and comment on lemmy.ml, both of these servers will have your comments. That’s already providing slightly more redundancy than reddit.

        • GuyDudeman
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          410 months ago

          I still don’t quite understand how the community is replicated…

          Are you saying that if Lemmy.ml/tiki exists and someone creates Beehaw.org/tiki that they are the same community? They would show the same posts and comments?

          Or are they completely separate communities that would just have the same name… users could subscribe to both if they wanted, but the posts and comments would be stuck on their respective instances?

          Or - Is it the case that Lemmy.ml’s tiki community and posts and comments are also stored on Beehaw.org somehow?

          If I deleted the tiki community on Lemmy.ml, would users from both communities lose their posts and comments from the Lemmy.ml instance of that community?

          • Pigeon
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            710 months ago

            The current state is that they are separate communities, but I believe the person you’re replying to is proposing something like the other option, where some communities would be the same across instances so that the community and its post history would survive if one of the instances went down (not currently the case).

            Currently, if you deleted the tiki community on lemmy.ml, only the lemmy.ml tiki community posts/comments would be gone. Any other tiki communities on other instances would remain.

              • @ketcham1009@lemmy.ml
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                210 months ago

                From how I understand it, they would be different communities. Example: you have lemmy server A, B, and C. Your account is on C, and all 3 servers have tiki comunities. To access tiki on C you would go to tiki (since it’s local), to access tiki on A you would go to tiki@A, b would be tiki@B.

              • Jakob :lemmy:
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                10 months ago

                If there’s a community serverA/tiki, you can search on serverB for serverA/tiki and join the community serverA/tiki from serverB. Content ist replicated to serverB and back.

                serverB/tiki@serverA is the replica you can fully use on serverB. This can exist beside serverB/tiki, which is a different community.

                If someone writes a posting or comment on serverA/tiki, you can see it in serverB/tiki@serverA.

                If someone writes a posting or comment on serverB/tiki@serverA, you can see it in serverA/tiki. (And even on serverC/tiki@serverA)

            • GuyDudeman
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              710 months ago

              Great idea, but then I’d have to get into the whole hosting thing and all of that which I don’t want to do.

              • @Mac@lemmy.world
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                610 months ago

                There may be someone in the community that’s interested and/or willing.

                But i agree, it’s not as simple as it sounds.

        • @federico3@lemmy.ml
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          110 months ago

          you could design the system in a way that one instance is mirrored and load-balanced across different hosters

          That’s exactly what I meant. Horizontal replication shares a lot of building blocks with federation. NNTP had peering/replication and worked quite well for a protocol designed in 1986.

    • _NetNomad @ DXC
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      1610 months ago

      i’ve been saying we need a COBOL/CICS implementation of ActivityPub for YEARS and it’s always the same “where the hell am i supposed to get a 3270 in 2023” and “what do you mean i can’t shitpost during the batch window”

  • comfy
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    @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.

    • Provoked Gamer
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      1610 months ago

      I agree because this way, new users will learn what and how to use other instances. Plus, it also helps with finding more content, especially if the user picked an instance without many people which makes there be less communities and content they can check out on first glance.

      • Red Army Dog Cooper
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        -410 months ago

        I disagree because it makes the more narrowly focused topic or theme based instances more daluted, makes everything blur together more, I also see it as a detrament to the smaller intances because they will now there local comunity will have less traffic

            • @gkd@lemmy.ml
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              110 months ago

              I think a client that might select a server for you by default (hopefully a trusted one of course) would make things way more easy to understand for the average user. Then making it easier to add or view communities on other instances.

  • anji
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    4610 months 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.

  • lightrush
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    4310 months ago

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

  • @Copio@lemmy.ml
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    Over at https://join-lemmy.org/ , when someone clicked on “Join a Server”, they are presented with a list of instances, it’s not that obvious that these are cross-accessible (yes, the homepage mentioned it, but not here), and people are bound to look for one with the most users.

    Perhaps, add a simple TLI5 explanation/diagram explaining how Lemmy works on https://join-lemmy.org/instances .

    (The documents are also too wordy for most people to care.)

  • Antman
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    I have been wondering how cumbersome the Lemmy design will become for some. I love the idea that it is federated and decentralized however these are also major drawbacks for most average users (i.e not multi account users.

    Multiple accounts needed for maximum uptime on different instances. What if I really like my username and its taken on another instance? If one instance is down and i comment with my other account will i then need to manage replies etc through different profiles? What happens if something spins up another instance of a similar domain so that they can get a username of someone to imitate them? I am sure these can be blocked after the fact or will other federated instances be automatically blocked.

    What happens when someone gets bored of their instance and stops it, or it gets blocked, or they start getting unwanted attention. Does this mean all that content then goes into the ether?

    Will this go down the route of whomever provides the instance with the most resources, best load balancing becoming the one, blocking other instances and controlling it as if it were private and independent?

    There are a lot wait and see things, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.

    • Undearius
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      I’ve experienced a taste of this already. I checked the instance list a couple days ago, and didn’t see one that stood out for my interests, so I created an account on the main lemmy.ml instance.

      I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

      ------

      Another “issue” (a bug or feature?) I’m seeing is there are a lot of duplicate communities between the instances. I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community.

      • @0xc0ba17@lemmy.ml
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        910 months ago

        I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community

        Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like “gaming”), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.

      • @PriorProject@lemmy.world
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        710 months ago

        I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

        I believe what you did was necessary. There’s a bug for account export and transfer to another instance, but it’s still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506. It doesn’t appear that Lemmy has an account migration feature like Mastodon does, and consequently you’ve got to migrate your settings manually and then leave some kind of post or link in your old profile to where the new profile is.

        • @Obi@sopuli.xyz
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          810 months ago

          But I understand that it’s possible, since it’s possible on Mastodon, right? IMO a smooth account migration process where you don’t lose anything on the account even if the server randomly shuts down, and it’s just another line in your account history solves a lot of the problems I see with Lemmy.

          Even for registration, it would lower the criticality of instance choice so you have more solutions like using a buffer server that gives people X time to choose another server, randomizing or even just to lower the pressure of it.

          • Tmpod
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            710 months ago

            Yes, it is possible, but was not a priority until now. The boom of users is basically just two days old, the devs have not gotten enough time to catch up yet hehe

            • @Obi@sopuli.xyz
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              110 months ago

              For sure for sure, can’t be easy keeping up with the sudden influx as it is, let alone launching new features.

              • Tmpod
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                310 months ago

                I’m not a dev, no. But I’ve been here a while and like to help out :)

          • @PriorProject@lemmy.world
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            210 months ago

            I’m no expert, but the dev commentary on that ticket suggests that it can be done but hasn’t risen up their priority list… and yeah… Mastodon accomplishing this with ActivityPub which Lemmy also uses suggests it’s possible. I agree it would be valuable, and opens up options when instances churn or get over/under populated.

        • @SloppilyFloss@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          You didn’t need to switch. You could’ve followed the same communities on lemmy.ml straight from your Beehaw account. It’s one of the benefits of federation.

          • GuyDudeman
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            510 months ago

            That needs to be made more clear, in my opinion.

            Also, how does a ban work in that case?

            If you’re signed into an account on Instance A and subscribed to a community on Instance B, and the Instance B admins ban you… Couldn’t you just sign up for a new account on Instance B or Instance C and rejoin/participate in the Instance B community again?

            Also, if the Instance A admins ban your Instance A account from their entire instance, couldn’t you just login to your Instance B account and join all of Instance A’s communities?

            For instance, if LemmyGrad banned my LemmyGrad account for being a “lib”… couldn’t I just use my Beehaw or Lemmy.ml account to participate in the LemmyGrad communities? Would this force them to detect/ban me twice?

            Seems like admins/mods of Lemmy instances and communities are going to have to be doing a multitude more work than the Reddit admins/mods.

            And they’ll have to also be detectives, to suss-out whether or not a user is someone who has previously been banned from their community.

            Once this gets going with bots and whatnot, the federated system seems to be a bit of a spaghetti nightmare.

        • @dan1101@lemmy.ml
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          210 months ago

          I went for beehaw first too, couldn’t get registration to respond but then saw they didn’t offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.

          • @Lobstronomosity@lemmy.ml
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            210 months ago

            Downvoting is just used as a disagree button, not for its original purpose of promoting discourse and hiding comments that don’t add to the conversation.

            Any comments that add to the conversation get upvotes. Any that don’t, can be reported and removed. I prefer it that way.

    • @RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml
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      1510 months ago

      These are some issues I’ve been thinking about as well.

      What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance? Maybe there should be a distributed user index amongst instances to prevent duplicate usernames?

      I think making the federalized infrastructure incumbent upon users to understand and select is not something the average user is going to bother with. This is complicated problem, I don’t know the answer might be off the top of my head.

      And what happens when an instance goes down? Does every user and their history get torched? Is there a migration process or at least a decommissioning policy in place?

      • poVoq
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        910 months ago

        Trolls impersonating the Lemmy developers has happened in the past. best is to report this to the instance admins who can delete the accounts as from the post history it is usually clear who the imposter is. Not sure if there can be a better way to handle this, probably not?

        • @Lobstronomosity@lemmy.ml
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          510 months ago

          As @RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml says, create a distributed index of usernames, and do not allow the same username to be registered twice.

          I’d also propose at the same time to create a Discord style username system to avoid potential clashes - if this system is going to become large (mainstream) then eventually available usernames will be hard to choose from.

          • GuyDudeman
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            210 months ago

            But I’ve already signed up as GuyDudeman on every Lemmy instance! What happens to all those accounts? 🤪

        • @RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml
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          There can be a manual process for anything, but could be a major issue if lemmy receives a big influx of “redfugees” in the coming weeks.

          Like I said, something like a distributed user index across instances could address this.

          • poVoq
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            210 months ago

            Then people would start name-squatting and you would end up with people having to resort to tom123@lemmy.ml just because someone on a totally different instance already registered tom@example.com. The instance already signifies that it is a different user and it is rather the exception that someone intentionally tries to impersonate a user by copying the avatar etc.

            • @RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              How is that ultimately any different from how usernames work in a centralized system? If you have a username on reddit, that’s your username no matter what the subreddit/community. I understand how lemmy is analogous to email, but I’m not sure it’s the right model for a link aggregator and discussion system.

              I guess what I’m saying is that decentralization may be better served if instances operated as an internal load balancing system rather than strictly separate servers. This would also help with an influx of new users, so you can just spin up a new instance and lemmy just flexes up without having to manually direct users to sign up on a specific server/instance.

      • @0xc0ba17@lemmy.ml
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        610 months ago

        What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance?

        Mastodon can have (has?) the same problem. This is somewhat solved with the self-verification process though, so it could be done similarly on Lemmy.

    • @naoseiquemsou@lemmy.ml
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      1110 months ago

      You made some good points. We often forget that most people have trouble with simple technical concepts, and the mere fact of having no simple and straightforward answer to “where do I register?” Is something that can inibit a lot of users.

      This happens so much in the open source world. Things that are obvious to us can be difficult to others, but open systems aren’t designed for the general public.

  • Dessalines
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    3910 months ago

    Another thing:

    We do need more site admins to help us handle the applications and moderation.

    For obvious reasons, we prefer ppl who have been here for a long time, and post / comment consistently. If you’d like to help us out, so that nutomic and I can focus on coding, that would be splendid.

    • Ada
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      1310 months ago

      I’d raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it’s probably not a good idea :)

      • Dessalines
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        610 months ago

        We’d love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.

    • ඞmir
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      810 months ago

      I can handle some applications daily, and I’m also planning to grow some more niche communities :)

    • @whiny9130@lemmy.ml
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      610 months ago

      I mean I’d love to help - either modding someone’s server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)

    • vxnxntA
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      210 months ago

      If needed, I’d also be more than happy to help.

  • @LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.ml
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    3410 months ago

    I tried like 4 or 5 instances before coming to lemmy.ml, but none of them were taking applications anymore. Finding even those was a hassle, since all I got was a list of domains without any details as to what the instance is about or if they allowed newcomers.

    Now that I’ve setup everything, Lemmy does seem like nice alternative to Reddit, but as someone from the outside, all of this is daunting.

  • @UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.ml
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    3210 months ago

    I sent my registration yesterday, because I signed in another instance, one from my country, but I couldn’t see all the post and no comments from lemmy.ml even thought is supposedly linked, so thank you for approving my account.

    Even if I’m a tech savvy person I found the whole experience of joining lemmy pretty bad, I like the concept of federation, but I think it’s too confusing to normal people, it really needs to be more seamless if you want to grow, how? idk, I was thinking some sort of replication, when you sign up, you are registered to the main instance (this) and given the choice to select other instances, automatically selecting let’s say another 3 based on your location, then your account is synced in all the registered and linked instances, when you login if an instance is experiencing overload then it switches to another one. I don’t know if this is realistic or out of the scope of Lemmy, or maybe against the philosophy of it. I’m just rambling.

    I’m just glad that there is an open alternative for anonymous social interaction in this day of walled internet services such as discord, twitter, facebook etc. and I wish you all the success.

    • @Deiv@lemmy.ml
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      2210 months ago

      Agreed, someone needs to create an easy “sign up here” with a default option (maybe just randomize across various instances, not sure)

      • Kamirose
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        1410 months ago

        Randomizing would cause lots of issues since each instance has different rules and philosophies. It’s a difficult problem to solve.

    • @Packopus@lemmy.ml
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      1610 months ago

      I found it rather easy to get signed up, just had to wait for the admin to actually approve the application. Otherwise it was pretty easy.

      However, I do see a HUGE benefit to “load balancing” as you are mentioning. Where you sign up for a master server and then replicated to the others that are more applicable. I’m surprised this isn’t already a process as this is very common in gaming and proxied sites.

      • @UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.ml
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        1410 months ago

        Yeah the registration itself was easy like any other site, I was talking more about grasping and understanding the concept of instances and how they interact.

        And as someone said in another comment, the see all posts options should be the default in your home and community search or you feel like in a dessert island when you are new to all of this.

        • drmodmin
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          910 months ago

          Both Mastodon and Lemmy have this problem. Make the default where the most new content is, which is going to be the federated tab and all tabs respectively.

    • Tmpod
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      810 months ago

      Yeah, federated logins of some sort would be really nice to have. There have been some mentions of integrating something from Streams onto Lemmy.

  • @Generator@lemmy.pt
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    2810 months ago

    If now is struggling then on June 12 will be a nightmare.
    Reddit will go dark in protest, many messages to join Lemmy, most instances will be overloaded or even DDoS with so many users, like what happen with Mastodon.

        • @JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
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          410 months ago

          Wasn’t even that long ago. I’d say only the past 3 or so years has Reddit stopped showing me the “oOps U BwoKe WokEy WedDit” screen on a regular basis. Up until then, I’d get that screen a good 20+ times per day.

  • @darkkite@lemmy.ml
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    2710 months ago

    I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.

  • @Barbarian@lemmy.ml
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    2510 months ago

    Users are likely going to see this as it’s the “official” Lemmy instance when trying to join for the first time.

    Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!

      • @FaceDeer@lemmy.ml
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        2110 months ago

        Seems like this should be a high priority feature. I did try joining a different instance but at the time only lemmy.ml was functioning and accepting applications. Now that I have subscribed to a bunch of communities starting afresh would be a bit of a hassle.

          • @FaceDeer@lemmy.ml
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            1210 months ago

            Well that’s not a good sign. I hope the potential flood of users brings a flood of devs along with it.

            • Tmpod
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              1810 months ago

              It will for sure. Lemmy has seen such a massive influx of new users in just two days. It has barely given any time for the devs and admins to catch up. Stuff takes time to implement, but fortunately, now there have been donations and more people helping out!

        • @Nyanix@beehaw.org
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          410 months ago

          I think that’s been one of the winning features of Mastodon that Lemmy could heavily benefit by implementing, this is a great callout