lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead
lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead
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.
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!
Naming things is one of the two most difficult issues in IT, alongside cache validation and off-by-one errors.
choosing the name for my instance was easy. programming related? programming.dev it is!
I was also contemplating setting up a new instance for this. I have 100s of gigs of unused ram, CPUs on idle and a 10gbit connection looking for something to do. The only issue I couldn't figure out was the name. I own itjust.works was thinking of something clever subdomain to use with it. I'm glad I'm not the only one with this issue
can't wait for fedd.itjust.works to go online!
Keep it simple with
lemmy.itjust.works.If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.
YetAnotherLemmy.Social coming online now soon?
It's a week later, but I did get this done finally. I've set up https://lem.monster/ . Still doing some tweaking, but it's open.
Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You're welcome there.
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.
@[email protected] 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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?
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.)
unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^
🎼The stranger there among them had a big iron on his hip🎶
gotta love a good gamer-flavour mainframe
Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.
Many thanks, dropped 10mBTC.
Thank you. Did the thing.
Thank you, dropped a few buckeroos :)
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.)
Pull requests welcome, the code is here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site
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
averageusers (i.e not multi account users.Multiple accounts needed for
maximum uptimeon 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 seethings, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.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.
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.
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.
That's me right now.
Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn't have communities I want.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, can't join another instance if they don't accept your application.
Yeah, I can agree. I applied at two instances and found one that did not have the questions and allowed me to make and verify. Once I got in, it's not too bad. I took a peek here first and saw the posts mentioning using All to see the instances, and then it opened a bit more.
This list may help newcomers:
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.
I'd raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it's probably not a good idea :)
We'd love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.
I'm happy to help if needed :)
I mean I'd love to help - either modding someone's server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)
I can handle some applications daily, and I'm also planning to grow some more niche communities :)
If needed, I'd also be more than happy to help.
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.
Agreed, someone needs to create an easy "sign up here" with a default option (maybe just randomize across various instances, not sure)
Randomizing would cause lots of issues since each instance has different rules and philosophies. It’s a difficult problem to solve.
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.
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.
Yeah, federated logins of some sort would be really nice to have. There have been some mentions of integrating something from Streams onto Lemmy.
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.@Generator And just like Mastodon and the fediverse at large, after initial growing pains, we will find a way
I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.
Pull requests welcome, here is the repo:
Is there any way to migrate instance or do I make a new account entirely?
You have to make a new account unfortunately.
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.
I just created https://lemmy.studio/ for music-related discussions.
It's good to be popular. Congratulations on the growth!
I guess every bigger instance needs to constantly promote a monthly support fee to keep the servers runnin. Something that most people already use and don't have to register first. Like PayPal or Patreon.
Edit: And I support Lemmy now on Patreon.
Got my instance running earlier today thanks to some helpful people in the Matrix chat. Intention at the time was to have some friends of mine join but I'm not opposed to having signups as well. Long live open source, federated software!
Yay, congrats!
If server crashes again the devs should just stop all registrations to this instance, people always follow path of least resistance and the first dev instance is just too easy to be stuck onto
This option seems pretty nice. Especially if, when refused entry, there is an easy link to browse other instances.
would be nice to put a notice saying new user registration temp disabled. or on the join page the instances with disabled registration get hidden or pushed down
That's what Mastodon servers were doing after Twitter.
Mastodon.social didn't have load issues though, they just wanted to promote federation for the health of the network, and growth slowed down considerably because of it. Not that it was a bad move, but if lemmy wants to absorb reddits userbase it will not work, because elon musk isn't a constant presence of vile encouraging migration unlike on twitter. reddit knows how to manage negative users, just look at what they did about alien blue. 4 years of premium and all was forgotten/forgiven.
Is there any way to transfer an account to a different instance?
There is an issue open for this at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506, but it's not addressed yet. To migrate, you'd have to:
- Manually create a new account.
- Manually copy your settings.
- Create a post, comment, or set your profile description to point to your new account so people can manually find you at your new account.
- Your existing comments and posts would stay associated with your current/old account.
I wouldn't sweat it though. It's not currently "broken", and the lemmy.ml admins can shut off new signups if it becomes a major problem. My take is this is more about directing new signups elsewhere. The one instance can't hold every new user that's signing up right now.
First post for me!
Sorry, I applied and got approved here. Still waiting to hear back from beehaw…
I’m really digging this UI compared to Reddit, but I am 99.9% a mobile user via the native Reddit app (don’t @ me!)
I am very tempted to setup my own instance. Wondering what resource usage looks like for an instance.
Yeah, I think I have two accounts (I registrated in a community and then came here and had to create another one because I couldn't log in). It's kind of confusing for people who are not as tech savy as myself.
Well, my understanding is your user exists on whatever instance you signed up on. You could technically create users on every single instance, but that is not necessary. You only need one user to exist somewhere, and then you can subscribe to, and post to communities on other instances.
For example: from lemmy.ml, if you search for
[email protected]you can then open the sidebar and subscribe to, and post to, the gaming community on beehaw.org with your lemmy.ml user.[email protected] is not the same community as [email protected]
Is there a feature to send a read-only/static link to Lemmy pages?
I’m envisioning a pre-cached version of the page that is updated hourly or so, rather than querying the database live for every comment on the thread. In a perfect world, these could also be offloaded to a CDN as static pages…
Even just caching the not-logged-in views can be a big help, as I've found with self-hosted WordPress.
Good idea I will give this a try.
That's basically what Reddit does when you're not logged in (and a bunch of similar sites too I guess).
I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.
I'll be honest. I only applied for this one but that was because I had (still have) no idea what I'm doing lol
That's how I wound up here too.
I just created https://lemmy.film if that would be useful for anyone.
Sorry for contributing towards this by registering but I'm very appreciative of the work being done to facilitate this community. I hope to see Lemmy grow with the negative direction other platforms are taking.
This is one of the biggest hurdles to get into Lemmy. I consider myself quite tech savvy but I am at a stage of my life that I cannot read hundreds of page of documentation just to use a forum.
There need to be a way to seamlessly move people from instance to another without them having to do it themselves or at the least a way way shorter documentation that goes to the point in one page.
I’ve only been here a day or so, but having to search for the community doesn’t seem that bad? It’s almost exactly like searching for a subreddit to join.
/r/subredditturns into!community@address, like [email protected]And once you are on that community you can open the sidebar and subscribe (join in Reddit terms).
I'm a noob. I created an account on beehaw and on lemmy.ml. That's because I see communities on one instance that I'm interested in and a different community on another instance. So if there's a technology community on both, how do I get to see all the technology posts without having to have two accounts?
This is really confusing for noobs like me. I'd just like to see one community to technology, one for Science, one for nintendo etc. I don't care it it's spread out amongst different servers to divvy up the load, but from the user side, it needs to be seamlessly integrated.
I'm still learning how all this works though. But I don't know how many folks that are more casual than me will be willing to figure it out. I hope they do though! It'll be worth it to leave reddit in the rearview mirror!
Edit: lawdy, I just figured it out. Local vs all on the communities list. It was right in front of my face. good grief!
well, what can be done to help with upgrades to this server? what does that entail?
This site is hosted on a VPS from ovh.com. I upgraded it from 4 vCPU to 8.
IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that's going to create performance problems.
We'll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.
No problem just make a pull request with your changes.
You probably don't want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)
That said, I dig what y'all are doing, and I'm veteran experience / interaction designer who's been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.
There's a website I highly recommend called fediverse observer, it doesn't really go based on interest, but it has some other factors it uses and I really like it.
I think that there should be some meaningful way to "preview" aspects of one instance that may make it more attractive than another instance to a new user. I just joined lemmy.world today simply because it seemed the most generic. Onboarding process could use some work; https://lemmy.world/post/37906 is great at explaining it but people will only really see it for the first time once they join...
Also I have no clue if that second link works. ¯\(ツ)/¯
I know I'm being a bit pushy at this point, but distributing instance load can be helped in some part by merging this PR and deploying the latest changes (including more languages and recommended instances as well) :)
Looks like it was just merged
Is there anyway to scale an instance by adding more nodes? Not be adding additional instances, but more of a distributed load balancing for a given instance? What about migrating communities to a different hardware instance? What scaling challenges does Lemmy face that something like Mastondon doesn't?
I'm sure there are many folks (myself included) who have technical resources that are not community builders. I'm sure if there if there is a way to spread the load, enough folks want this to succeed to make it work.
This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.
Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won't necessarily help with the load. What's needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that's not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL...)
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"?
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.
thanks for the quick answer!
That's a bummer but it is good to know.
Currently you have to start over.
Saldy it's very common to have this influx towards the "main server" as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.
Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.
I don't think you can expect the bulk of reddit (not technical) user base to care or know what federation is.
If people need to hunt out servers they will stay on something centralized until an alternative takes over.
Hence why Mastedon is dead in the water.
Soo, stupid question maybe but how does federation work with your own instance?
I've set up a solo instance using ansible and subscribed to [email protected]. If I wanted my ALL page populated with posts from other lemmy.ml communities, would I have to subscribe to each individually? Or does my instance fetch lemmy.ml's Local eventually?
I've confirmed that federation is working using the method described in lemmy's docs and lemmy.ml (+ a few other instances) is listed under "Allowed instances" in my admin panel.
From what I can tell, it won't automatically pull in all communities from another instance - it'll only "know" about a community once someone has searched/subscribed to it, unless I'm missing something.
Also just as a heads up, explicitly specifying allowed instances puts the federating onto an allow-list only sort of mode I believe - if you want to allow federating with all instances you can do so by leaving that field blank (and putting in explicit entries into the blocked list will ignore requests/connections from those instances). Of course, if that's intentional then my apologies! 😅
Good to know, thanks! In that case some way to discover and promote global communities would be really helpful. Does any of the instances have something like this?
And yep, had to remove the allowed instances as your comment was not showing up (and now I can't reply from my own instance, probably takes a few minutes to fetch it now that the Allowed list is empty).
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements
How/which URL should we link to then? Now is the best time to get users to switch to Lemmy so we need to make it as newbie friendly as possible. Already the application process has put off some people (I do like that bit though, keeps away the low effort folks). Thanks.
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?
If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.
You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on
lemmy.mlsimilarly to howmastodon.socialdid 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...
Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @[email protected]
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?Are there any published guidelines on the server requirements for an instance? I have my own instance running, seems to be working fine. But I'm reluctant to open it publically without an idea of if I'm setting myself up for failure or not.
Related, is there a way to entirely disable image uploads to my instance? I'm ok with it being a "reader" instance, but don't want to be hosting content directly.
The backend especially is not too demanding (thanks to using a compiled binary via Rust). The database demands probably scale, but postgres scaling is relatively well understood. I think right now the least scalable parts look like the frontend node and websocket stuff, but that can be improved. I'm not sure how I feel about Activity Pub protocol wise, it feels pretty chatty, so transit scalability might be something else to consider.
We are currently removing websocket and switching to http, so that should be much better soon. Load from the frontend and Rust backend are both pretty low for now.
I believe Dessalines or nutomic were saying on a Matrix room that Postgres was their worst performing component at the moment, and why they needed a vCPU upgrade on their server. Maybe some sort of managed off-site Postgres instance could be an option?
I know it probably won't be fun for you hosting, but this makes me happy! Hopefully Lemmy will grow a lot!
I'm going to setup a Lemmy node. I'm not on lemmy.ml anyway, but I want this platform to r0ck!
I'll lean it up ASAP!
Crashing with 994 users online?
that's not a good look
Well when you host your own website with your own funds, you try to not pay for unneeded perfs. But then a few hundreds people join, register, create content, upload images and videos, and suddenly your small VPS can't handle the load. And you're hesitant to scale up because it costs money, sometimes it costs time too because you need to migrate stuff, and maybe in a few days (or a few hours?) that load will disappear and now you're on a more expensive tier for nothing.
Can attest: I have a small VPS (docean's lowest tier, in fact) and in the deep past I had occasions where a blog post was popular enough to throw it offline for a while. I wasn't about to lock myself into paying more money forever, to keep the site running for a day's peak traffic.
In the case of lemmy.ml, this isn't helped by the frontend being Websockets-driven, which holds open a connection for every concurrent user; I hear Dessalines and crew are working on cutting that dependency out and dropping down to something more static, which should help with load.
Yep Lemmy is over. We go back to Reddit now.
Yup, pack it up boys. Was a good 2 days, but as lemmy.ml has the only functional server on the planet, we're done here (/s, obviously)
Yep Lemmy is over. We go back to Reddit now.
if your post history is anything to go by, maybe you should go back to Reddit lol. You brought the toxic side with you.
Yes, I agree. Please go.
I guess it’s good news that a lot of people are migrating from other sites like me
Yeah. Fuck Reddit and their stupid policies. I hope this will be a great alternative for Reddit communities
@ devs:
Can you please focus your work on optimising performance for the UI? It will greatly reduce the amount of electricity and money spent, so you're actually multiplying every tenth of a second you can shave off of CPU time...
Thank you a lot for writing this software. It's been a great little project so far and it seems to go down the Mastodon route of increased popularity. Be proud!
We're about 80% done with a big rework of the UI to switch from websockets to http. This should solve most of the stability and performance issues of both the front and back end.
I run a general purpose, (currently) single-user instance as of yesterday. It will be funded through end of 2023 and then I'll probably beg for donations if I host other users. https://links.dartboard.social
This is hosted on Digital Ocean and I can scale up CPU/RAM/Storage/Bandwidth as needed. (I already did once)
Single user instances are really great for the health of the network too.
Agreed. How I've approached my akkoma instance (dartboard.social) - if someone else joins, great, I'll put in effort to make the instance a safe and accommodating space for them. If it's just me, then that's great too.
@dessalines @knova Not so great for trying to find people to follow though? Unless I'm missing something..?
If anybody else is lost and wants a basic general-purpose home for their account, https://lemm.ee is on good hardware and open for signups.
lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.
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.
Yes, this is a serious defect in the Lemmy infrastructure.
That's actually a good idea
Beehaw has a concerning financial post at the top of their frontpage that may indicate they might struggle too when the massive wave of Reddit exodus occurs.
I guess I have to figure out what instances to suggest to people. I do find that direct instance suggestions is the way to go, so I guess I gotta write up a list.
Ideally, some pre-existing communities on Reddit would create their own instances similar to how often they have their own Discords, and have large amounts of users migrate that way. But there's a huge, wide, amount of technical difference between those two things. You can't exactly easily find capable Lemmy admins.
Ok. I have what might be a strange question. Can you host a server but disable community creation (even if only temporarily)? So, the server would essentially just be a platform from which others could access content published elsewhere in the Fediverse. I'm assuming the load would then be on the database behind my instance, correct?
I'm a Platform/Cloud/DevOps Engineer (the titles are always changing) working in software. I'm reasonably sure I could host an instance to help out without much difficulty. But I'm not sure I'm ready to jump into the moderator role, though I realize I'll need to deal with those who break some basic rules.
Sure. Just create a server and subscribe to communities. Then disable public registration. Anybody can read the content on your instance. So far as I know, you can read the content on any public instance without an account.
Or am I not understanding your question?
Yes, even some of the big instances disable community creation.
I signed up on lemmy org uk originally (day or 2 ago) and now it seems to be gone. If I could have kept my account some how that would have been better, but here I am instead.
Was it badly aministered or it has been done on purpose so that people think lemmy is not reliable ?
I have no idea. Pretty sure it only lasted a week or so. Maybe the server owner had some issues they couldn't resolve.
If it comes back, maybe I'll find out
I was contemplating signing up on that instance but couldn't find anything about who runs it, or how likely it was to stick around. I think there was also a thread on there where they refused to accept donations too.
With an average VPS running you about 100-200 quid a year, as a hobby I think it's gonna get expensive when you need to upgrade cores, storage etc. Not to mention you also need to moderate the instance.
For hosting a federated Lemmy to work I think you need a team and possibly a plan for accepting donations if it can't be run out of pocket
I wish I'd noted the user name of the server owner, I think they were on mastodon.
Oooh so this is why it's lagging extremely, guess I'll go on the grad for a few days, or weeks
Can I login to another instance with my lemmy.ml account? Or do I need multiple accounts?
You need an account with that instance to log in. Once logged in though you can post on any community, as long as your instance federates with the instance where that community is.
One thing cool about piped.video (Youtube frontend), you can use the same login on different instances.
That's something that should exist on fediverse, you use the same account created on mastodon.social and login with the same on lemmy.ml
An account on a given instance only lets you log on to that instance. You can use that account to interact with people from other instances, however.
@CannotSleep420 @cosmicsploogedrizzle Hello from Mastodon.
I applied for behaw about 24 hours ago without response nor success logging in. Wondering if they have temporarily suspended applications?
Same here! I was starting to think my application was rejected. So I signed up here on lemmy.ml and was approved fairly quickly.
They might just have a massive backlog. They're at the top of the "Suggested instances" section.
I like to call Lemmy "Feddit".
I like to call Reddit "Deaddit"
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.
There is a new announcement saying they upgraded hardware yet again
I believe the only way to get Lemmy working with every "refugees" is indeed to run organised instances. I'm thinking of a Circlejerk instance (yeah sorry, first example I had in mind) with all the jerk communities such as r/Watchescirclejerk, r/Carcirclejerk, etc... Could work for countries, car, music communities... I might be wrong though as I'm quite new to all of this.
No idea if you're into it, but I'm working on running my own organized instance for popheads, think Taylor Swift, Camila Cabello, Lana Del Rey, there are dozens, if not hundreds of subs in that category that I think deserve their own instance. (Even SwiftieCircleJerk, which I love)
If you're one of them, registrations are open on mine, https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech
Not knocking the original idea, but since this isn't Reddit, I don't think we need "circlejerk" communities until the communities here become large enough to have CJ style takes to lampoon. Otherwise they'd all be satirizing Reddit and since this isn't Reddit, maybe that's best avoided?
Could probably just be meme communities
Yeah, obviously. My point wasn’t "Damn we need those Circlejerks on Lemmy asap" haha. Just that we might need organised instances, sorted by specific subjects : animals, cars, music, food, etc.
If I were to host an instance, let’s say for music, its communities could be guitar, piano, every instruments, and why not genre : baroque, classic, romantic, etc… So that people would know where to go to talk music.
Having many generic instances with clone subs on each (like memes, technology, politics, whatever) won’t help audience development and instance hosting I guess.
So, might I recommend having a button on the top bar that shows us the instances we've subscribed to, and maybe a quick link to the list of available instances? People like easy navigation, having to do multiple bookmarks or navigate through finding a link to the list of servers is not easy navigation.
It also avoids centralization. sopuli.xyz has a list of alternate communities to the ones on lemmy.ml.
This is inevitable if feddit is going to become mainstream. People have a herd mentality, if Lemmy is going to become popular there will always be a handful of instances that are much more popular than the others. These popular instances will need to scale (both vertically and horizontally) while the smaller instances will probably keep getting by with a single server. This is the same way email providers work, half the people I know use gmail, and most of the others use another large provider like yahoo or hotmail. It's just the way this is going to have to work. People want to join an instance with their friends, even if they're all federated together. They want to know that the instance they sign up for has peer approval and it's already a tried and trusted one.
@[email protected] what kind of hosting do you guys use for lemmy.ml? At the time of writing it looks like you have around 33k users and around 2k active. What does that look like for resources consumed?
New user,how do I donate / tip to help you peeps cover server costs? It wasn't directly obvious how to do it; apologize if it's a big button right on a page that I missed.
Here. Liberapay is preferred.
Done my bit, started with a 5 dollar donation, monthly!
For future reference, the heart button up top is for funding.
For non technical users, the idea of instances can be a very confusing concept (the email analogy is a good one but its still confusing for people). I know you guys have a lot on your plate in terms of development wise, however I hope that prioritizing keeping lemmy.ml up is high up there. I say this because its the instance that most users from Reddit will flock to. And the last thing they need is to create an account then have the site go down for 6 hours. I havent experienced it going down. Although hopefully you have a backup site for when it does (what I mean is just a page that says your down/your working on fixing it... Try these instances instead.)
It's confusing even for me. Do I get to see every post in every instance? Do I get to see all the comments? Do others get to see all of my posts irrespective of their instance? Can I see and interact with all users irrespective of their instance? Can I browse Lemmy if my instance is overloaded? If not, can I seamlessly move to a different instance?
Do I get to see every post in every instance?
Do I get to see all the comments?
Do others get to see all of my posts irrespective of their instance?
Can I see and interact with all users irrespective of their instance?Yes
Can I browse Lemmy if my instance is overloaded?
You can browse, but you can only vote, post, and comment from your home instance.
If not, can I seamlessly move to a different instance?
Not as far as I know, but I'm very new to the fediverse as well. Your account is tied to your instance, but there is nothing preventing you from having accounts on multiple instances. You can even choose the same username! Usernames are
@[email protected]For example, I'm
@[email protected], but I also have a mastodon account@[email protected]. I can browse Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/etc. from any of my accounts, but anything I post or comment will be from the account I'm using at the time.
I've made https://lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/ to help take off some of that load. New registrations are welcomed and it should be maintained for a very very long time 🎂
https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉
is there a way to see new users stats somewhere ?
Have we started the fire?
@Designate6361 We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire. No we didn't light it but we tried to fight it.
Would be really nice if on the instance page you could have some extra information admins could fill in like max capacity and such, think that people would be more inclined to choose other instances if they could see how close the instance is to the approximate member limit
I am trying to start my own instance, but this documentation is broken.
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/from_scratch.html
I have gone through it three times now.
The daemon on Ubuntu won't start because of permission issues.
thread 'main' panicked at 'Failed to load settings file: LemmyError { message: None, inner: No such file or directory (os error 2), context: "SpanTrace" }', /home/ubuntu/.cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-6f17d22bba15001f/lemmy_utils-0.17.3/src/settings/mod.rs:18:33
Because of how rust/cargo installs their "registry"
Fix the docs and I will start another instance ASAP.
You could try asking that question in Lemmy support community, I'm just a random user xD
Search for lemmy_support and it should turn up (if you're an lemmy.ml)
I successfully installed it following this instructions https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html and using this repo https://github.com/zxk7516/lemmy
At what point do you plan to close this instance to new users?
I'm happy with Feddit _
It seems like a common issue among ActivityPub services that people flock to the most popular instance and this causes problems. Why can't load balancing happen transparently? It seems like the main thing that actually makes a difference between which instance users want to join is what the moderation will be like. Like I don't want to be forced to sign up for an instance with a high amount of censorship compared to the rest of instances.
So maybe user registration should start from a centralized site that can describe the trade-offs of joining the various instances, and users don't get to select their specific instance by default, but rather they select based on a loose moderation policy, and then load-balancing occurs on the backend.
EDIT: I also want to be able to migrate between instances without losing my community subscriptions.
Thar she blows!
Nope, none at all. A signed off user is one that's not causing server load :P
Being new to federated communities, this is good info! I’m also registered on both and hoping I wasn’t causing problems. Glad to hear it’s only when I log in :P
is there some kind of status page to have a look at and see how things are going? I cannot make any comments to a specific community at the moment and wondering why.
EDIT: Figured it out, when I tried to leave a comment via Jerboa I got an error "Language not allowed" and so I selected a language on the desktop site and then my comment went through. Note that this error does not appear on desktop site so I had no idea what was going on and why my comment was not going through
@nutomic For now I am using my brand new mastodon as backup, but I am thinking of joining kbin as well. So many options!
hehe just recovered my 3 year old account
checkmate!
I wouldn't mind running my own single user instance, but it seems a little challenging to set up rn. I would love to be able to set one up easily with a rasperry pi or my truenas core server.
A "single click" docker stack for unraid would a great option. Lots of DIY NAS systems out there
sounds like an interesting summer project
What if I wanted to create an instance where upvotes are disabled? Could that be possible? @nutomic
Sure if you implement such a feature. Its all open source.
Only in open source do the devs say "do it yourself" 😂
Of course, I'm just poking fun. I imagine you're working very hard. Especially of late
Great, I'll get to that sooner or later
Lol yeah. I learned my lessons from using Matrix.
Come join us at thebestinstance.com fam!
Is there any way to help out with hardware when you are peaking ? I don't have the necessary knowledge about the fediverse, but I was thinking connecting my own server, or perhaps just open a 'help out' page where some webassembly/webrtc is taking some of your peak load ?
I wouldn't mind opening an extra 'worker' page or having a helper service on my server, when I feel the lemmy server is peaking.
Sad to hear that. I guess I will wait a bit for it to calm down then, because this has been my favourite instance.
Have already moved - will keep hunting for the best instance for me but appreciate this Digg jr aka reddit killer.
Looks like beehaw.org is down
Even when it's up, I'm unable to register - it just sits there and spins forever. 😕
Well, I've moved out until this dies down. Leaving my lemmy.ml account inactive and living here for a while :)
Does anyone know if social media is against Oracle cloud free tier ToS? I didn't see anything specific when I googled it, but ToS aren't always in that. Was trying to setup an instance on a smaller vps I have that's idle but 512MB won't cut it.
I'd suggest not to go with Oracle free tier. A lot of people are reporting having their instances completely removed without any communication, then support refusing to help. Would suck to have a community started to lose everything.
Is there an API for that returns the instance list is JSON?
No but you can generate your own list: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-stats-crawler/
It seems the lemmy.ml instance is really slow, times out, etc. I fear this will be a bad experience for new users migrating from reddit. Anything we can do? Any place to donate to scale it up, or would it be a good idea for existing users to migrate ourselves to different instances?
edit: I did find the donate heart at the top. Not sure how fast that'll improve things but I did make a small donation.
@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.
No. I don't think I will.
Might be a silly question, but: does ActivityPub support setting up a subinstance that gets its data from somewhere else? Traditionally you'd probably do that with a pgsql machine and multiple frontends, but having thought about it while typing this out, putting that load on the ActivityPub protocol would mean loading up the master to much the same extent as just having the traffic hit the master directly...
You can setup a new instance (or join an existing one), then follow remote communities you are interested in. All the content will get mirrored over time, and you can interact with it seamlessly.
I'm not sure how such arrangement would work, but if postgres really becomes a bottleneck, hosters could consider some sort of managed postgres cluster.
Im a lemmy.ml user since 2021. I need to create a community 'goth-music-oriented' or need help to get /c/goth more visible (it doesn't appear in the lemmy community browsing.
The former community creator, Maya, i think she abandoned the community. Her last post was 2 years ago. Thank you in advance for any help.
I checked the documentation, but I have no idea how to move from one instance to another. Is it because beehaw.org is also struggling or am I just too dumb for this?
You make a new account on the other instance. There is no migration functionality (yet).
Does that mean that is a viable possibility that is being explored for the future? I would be interested to see how that works out in if there would need to be an "acceptance" from the admission of another instance, for example. It would certainly help lighten the load of users.
Thanks for everything you're doing.
Did my part and created an instance in the hopes of offloading some of the bigger instances: https://rammy.site
No clue if and how I should promote it, though. Looks like it's just me for now.
I hope it's not inappropriate to comment this here, but if anyone's looking for another space to join, I'm in the process of building Krab Borg. It would be lovely to have people to help fill it out and diversify the communities, as well as suggest what the local ones should look like as I have no idea.
I'm trying to balance not reinventing the wheel/duplicating existing communities 100 times but also still supporting the idea of decentralisation and creating some duplicates (though this isn't hard and fast, I'm open to feedback).
I've seeded it with some communities from other servers (including a bunch from lemmy.ml) to get things moving a bit as well.
something like lemmy-in.[tld] ?
Is this why I can't create a new community? I've tried 3 times and it just keeps spinning when I hit submit.
Did you check that the community didn't already exist?
I did not! I'll own that, that was indeed my fault!
However, I didnt receive an error of any kind, once I clicked submit it just kept spinning with no reload or anything.
I'm going to open a GitHub issue for this.
Thank you for pointing that out!
Test
If anyone is looking for a new home I just started a new instance called wizanons.dev! We're magic themed and friendly! LGBTQIA+ friendly and we have a !magic community for aspiring wizards, mages, warlocks, and witches. Discussion on mysticism and psychedelics welcome! Always looking for more friendly apprentices and fellow arcane researchers.
You should probably strike beehaw from your list of recommentations considering the agitation against this platform that they started running almost instantly
After watching a video and looking around it looks like I was in error. Pretty much I can be signed into lemmy.ca ... then change he view filter to show all communities and subscribe to technology community on ML. The subscribe button does not always update right away. But in my listing of lemmy.ca I see I am subscribed. Hope this helps someone else.
Yeah, I signed up for lemmy.ml, but when trying to login I get stuck on an infinite loading button. I assume this is caused by the overloaded servers?
I got that earlier today as well. I wasn't sure if it was just overloaded or if it was a UX design oversight for accounts pending approval.
Edit: yeah, it must be the server load. I can't login from my other device.
Edit 2: nope, actually it seems to be a UX bug when the username or password is incorrect. Just keeps spinning instead of giving an error message.
