That gave me an image. Think of Atlas, the guy who had to hold up the world, only replace that person with the individuals trying to keep up with server demand of lemmy.world
If I could do anything in artwork or Photoshop I’d create a meme myself.
small instances are the best, remember it will take some time before new subscriptions start flowing into the server esp if you are the first person to sub to a remote community.
Thanks so much for this. I've been pulling my hair out trying to figure out which instance is actually near me. Join-lemmy instance descriptions really should include servers' general locations.
It's weird. My instance is hosted on a VPS in New Jersey, but shows here in Mexico. The company I rent the server from doesn't have a data center in Mexico
"Ping" shouldn't affect lag, and your ping should be almost unnoticeable to you. Ping basically means the time a packet takes to the server.
For anything other than a video game, you're going to focus more on server load, and utilization. If something is overloaded (Lemmy in general is overloaded) it doesn't matter what your ping is, the server can't process as many requests as it gets and you see "Lag".
Part of the process right now is figuring out if Lemmy can keep up with the traffic, this is part of the growing pains of a new "social media" server. Best thing to do if it's bothering you is give it a few days and hope they can work something out.
The point I'm making is "ping doesn't matter". If you want to go to a different instance that's fine, find one that seems responsive. You're using the wrong terminology/thinking when deciding which instance you want to be on.
My understanding (from limited knowledge) is that also due to how federation works even if you're instance isn't under too much load, you may notice issues with posts/comments from other instances if they're struggling.
I’d like to see or make a tool that measures “federation” quality.
Lots of servers are locally responsive, but lag or completely fail posting to remote servers or accepting remote requests.
How can i participate in a conversation when half of the instances are hours behind or may not get my comments at all :(
This seems to be a combination of software and load and it is very insidious because it doesn’t affect local functionality so admins that don’t care or check think their communities are just fine.
Pretty sure there are many reasons this is the case. High influx and abnormally high active users is even hard for large websites to manage properly. I know a lot of the instance owners are working tirelessly to update and manage the extra traffic.
That being said I know virtually nothing about how this all works but from what I understand even if you were to join a low latency instance that has less users you would need to still “speak” with the higher traffic instances for any content posted there. So you would still have the same issues on most content.
Someone more knowledgeable should correct me where I am wrong because I certainly might be.
There are plenty of ping tools available. If you're on Android, you might be interested in Termux (F-Droid, Play), that lets you have a Linux commandline right on your phone. I personally use Net Analyzer (Play) too but there are plenty out there.