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.
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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.
While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There’s the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.
Yeah, the fact that the user auth and permission models were intentionally left out of the W3C spec initially really ended up locking ActivityPub into particular dialects and patterns that are now proving problematic for scaling.
I’m not sure it’s 100% too late for a redesign, though. The committee is still active and the Fediverse could still theoretically grow by an order of magnitude or two. Does that seem likely right this minute? No, but sometimes that kind of vision is what an ecosystem needs.
Not sure why you reference Matrix, which has even worse scaling issues as it indeed tries to replicate nearly the entire network on every server.
The Fediverse is really just working how the general web does, just with some standardized API for websites to interact. It’s not perfect, but it works and has proven to be relatively scalable.
It sounds a bit like you had a bit too much of the Bluesky cool-aid, which indeed replicates nearly all of the mistakes of Matrix and makes it impossible to scale via small community owned servers instead of big company owned data-centers (which might be by design?).
Well yeah, point taken that replicating everything everywhere and forever might be impossible. But I do believe at a minimum my identity should be portable and accessing Fedi (ie. in microblogging: posting and viewing a feed of the latest posts of my follows) should be decoupled from which instance I pick to access the Fediverse.
I don’t particularly like how owners of instances which grew are now essentially locked in to having to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars a month keeping their now expensive instances running and providing service. This is a bad place to be for a platform ran by volunteers. Letting instance owners scale their service down as well as up would be ideal. But this requires at least decentralized identity, and at best some form of content hosting redundancy…
It’s easy to say the current architecture of Fedi works when it’s still small. Your instance has 139 users… That’s not intended as a slight. Hosting instances is good and I applaud you for it! But I wish it were easier to more equally share the load once the platform becomes more popular.
Is there any group of devs that work on this issue that you know of? I’d be interested in looking into it.
No. And I think it’s a really hard problem. poVoq was right to call me out on full replication being a bad move, because duplicating all content on every server is obviously inefficient. But a solution in-between, with decentralization and redundancy, is probably a very complex challenge. Doesn’t seem impossible, but very complex network protocols rarely seem to succeed.
Edit: Sorry I was still thinking about some fabled perfect protocol. But if you’re looking into decentralized identifiers, W3 is working on one approach. It’s not something I have seen used anywhere or integrated with ActivityPub yet, but that could be the future I’m hoping for. Probably.
It almost sounds like you’re describing RAID 5 of content across fediverse servers.
Something like that. But also with fully decentralized identity. So all content is signed by a keypair which is local to the user, and can be used to access Fedi through arbitrary instances. Probably I am too wishful.
I feel like for decentralized identity maybe a page could be taken out of Blockchain. Ethereum ledger is duplicated in its entirety on every host, and there are L2s that help spread the load but roll up to the L1. If identity could be attached to something like that, each person has a key to identify themselves. Identity I think would be best separated from all content related to the identity, the user could choose a server to host that data, as well as back it up with like a shared user data backup agreement between a few servers in case one dies. It’d be very similar to raid but the data only needs to be on 2-3 servers. I suppose community data could be the same. I can envision when a new server joins the federation, it could be auto assigned to share with 2-3 similarly sized communities with algorithms making sure there aren’t any closed groups of sharing (a->b&c, b->a&c, c->a&b) wouldn’t ever want that. They all seems to be the most reasonable solution in my head.
I could envision a 2nd class of server, running something like OAuth/OIDC, which handles the authentication into any Lemmy instance (or better yet, any ActivityPub based instance).
This server would also be self-hostable, and provide only authentication services, so it would be rather lightweight. But would help reduce the load on the content servers.
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!
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
sh.itjust.works
I did it! https://sh.itjust.works
Credits go to you for the naming
Dude killer url, nice one! Question for all, I clicked their link and went there and it’s an instance, surely. I tried to comment on their post, but was required to sign in… I’m already signed in over here, I gotta sign in there, too? Anyhow I tried to sign in with my lemmy.ml creds but that didn’t work. How can I interact with posts there?
When you open a post it should show you instructions on the right: use the search bar in lemmy.ml to search for
!main@sh.itjust.works
Lol awesomesauce. I just made an account, I’ll use it as my main instance for a while. Let’s hope we can survive reddit hug of death 2.0 in July!
@autisticaudioguy lol same, just signed up today.
This is a great one! Might use it
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.
Do you also have a few million dollars under your mattress? 😁
I’d like to tell myself that if it got to the point where it started to cost a few million that i would be able to have it pay for itself!
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.
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’m getting the following error reading this post: “item at index 2 does not exist”
Should I post this on stack overflow or some other Lemmy help community?
Which frontend are you using?
There are only two hard things in CS: naming things, caching, and off-by-one errors.
I already said that
Look at that, you sure did. I missed the “two hard things”. Wasn’t even drunk. 🤷
I name everything as var1 var2 etc.
var37.social incoming
Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You’re welcome there.
Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml
could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
If so, would you mind setting a “goalpost” for the community to help lift the financial burden?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!
Simple: subscribe to both. Ever seen how many /r/trueX subreddits there are (where X is any popular subreddit)? That’s basically what’s going on here.
It still might be nice to be able to combine communities into a single view, kind of like a multireddit. If there’s a technology@beehaw.org and a technology@lemmy.ml, I want to see them both on the same screen without having to jump between them. This isn’t currently possible, right?
I thought it would be possible as long as Beehaw and Lemmy.ml are federated together.
I have to imagine this is coming.
Probably possible but not implemented. That’s more or less just a UI thing.
there should also be a “subscribed” option that’ll show you posts from only the communities that you’ve subscribed to across all instances
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.
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 🎂
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.
@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.
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No. I am on my own little single-user instance and I can follow, vote, post and reply anywhere from here. It’s just a little awkward sometimes because you have to learn how to paste URLs in the search box, and until you subscribe there will be some missing content. But once you get past that, everything works.
if you’re a registered user on a server, when you click [Communities], there you can see
- [local] communities - Those created on your server
- [all] communities - Those local and also those already federated to your server
You can subscribe to a community of any server which your server can federate with. The list of connected servers you can find via the /instances link at the bottom of the page.
There’s an easy to use community search tool here https://browse.feddit.de/
If you’ve found a community you like to follow, translate the original URL to a federated URL You do this by putting the community URL of the original server in the search bar; e.g.
(This search functionality is available in the web interface, but not yet available in the Jerboa app)
The result will list the federated URL. A federated URL has the form:
https://<your server>/c/<community-id>@<other server>Visiting the federated link, and clicking [Subscribe] will make that community be federated to your server from now on. Your subscribed community will now also be listed under the [all] communities listing on your server.
Is there a newbie guide written up already somewhere? This is exactly the sort of things it needs, which should be linked to new signups.
Documentation etc can be found from their github page
Sure it can be found there, but pointing newbies to github would be too demanding.
At the bottom of every page, there you find a link to the documentation pages.
Sure, its a bit wordy… lacking in images with step by step instructions. If I had time I’d put something together with screenshots and figure out git and submit a pull request… maybe eventually.
Nope. You can subscribe/post/comment on any community on any instance. There is one small seam though: if you’re the first person to subscribe from your instance, you need to put in the full URL of the community (https://lemmy.ml/c/gaming, for example) to pull it into your instance.
After that, everybody on the same instance as you will see it when searching for communities just like it was local.
EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention: make sure the search is set to “All”, not “Communities” when you do this.
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Technically yes, but it’s not even vaguely in the same ballpark. If I’ve understood the devs talking about the optimization issues (I could be wrong! Just my limited understanding) the big performance hit is in the local feed. That means being on another instance takes a gigantic amount of the load off, even if you’re still accessing the same community.
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If lemmy.ml is down, so are all the communities hosted there. All communities not on lemmy.ml would still be up.
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Correct the performance problem now is all from local users (visiting lemmy.ml in their browser or app).
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If lemmy.ml goes down, other instances still have full mirrors of them. Users there can interact with their local mirror as usual, and other users can see those interactions. However these would not be federated to other instances (lemmy.ml is responsible for announcing community posts to followers). However federated actions are retried a few times so it might federate later.
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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.
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.
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.
If cockroach is truly PG compatible, lemmy admins can swap it in without developer support. I suspect Cockroach constrains some SQL features and has poor performance on others, but that or AWS Aurora are things you can experiment with without dev support if you’re passionate about the proving out the value of scale-out.
The statement that spawned my response though was this:
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.
I still don’t think it’s true that we need horizontal scaling to support sufficiently large instances. The amount of vertical and horizontal scaling ability built into Lemmy today is both useful, and likely to outstrip the current ability of its code to scale a single instance. Any algorithms that scale super-linearly with respect to comment-count, post-count, user-count, or community-count, will fail just as hard with distributed backends as they do with an RDBMS. And as you note, PG-compatible distributed systems provide a potential lower-engineering-cost on-ramp to distributed systems once the codebase is efficient-enough to warrant such a transition to scale further. I suspect I’ve contributed everything of use I have to this thread though, and don’t expect to respond further.
Thank you for your thorough explanations and input. It definitely gave me a few things to think about. And if I have some spare time I might even try to spin up lemmy in some local k8s to see how it reacts to being scaled up and down.
As someone not versed in DBs and scaling for web architecture, this was a super fun read through, appreciate the comment chains from both users.
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.)
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?
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.
The Tiki community should simply run a Tiki server, no? Problem solved.
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.
There may be someone in the community that’s interested and/or willing.
But i agree, it’s not as simple as it sounds.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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?
You have to create a new account. But that’s easy ;)
That’s kind of wrong though, isn’t it? What about stuff like GDPR data exports? Users should be able to export their data, then import it into another instance, effectively migrating instances.
You can on Mastodon, you just export your data, delete your account, create new account on another instance and upload your data and it’s like what you said!
You are free to learn to program and write a user import routine for lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
I know how to program, I also know how to wonder how many instances are running off the docker-compose with publicly exposed postgres… that would make import/export really easy, wouldn’t it? 🙄
Anyway, would you say this isn’t the right place to discuss this stuff?
Why would this be not the right place?
You tell me, you sent me away.
I think data protection, retention, access, rectification and deletion laws are going to hit anyone hosting an instance. The EU is also in the process of introducing a “data migration” law, that is mostly targeted at “large” social media, but we’ll see what ends up getting approved.
I’m not a compliance expert, but what I know about these laws makes me fear setting up an instance just to get hit by whatever fines.
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.
@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.
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 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
Perhaps the default should be a per-instance setting and/or a user preference.
I would agree with a per user or per instance
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.
Nah people will find it. Right now it should be just about growth and then let it specialise from there
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.
That’s actually a good idea
