I think you may misunderstand. Let’s say Lemmy.world goes down, you are still free to make a new account on any other Lemmy instance and still have the same username (hopefully). Smokeydope@Lemmy.world simply becomes smokeydope@lemm.ee or whatever instance you make a new account on. A lot of instances federate with most other instances so you will more or less get access to the same content. A good Lemmy client like Voyager/wefwef.app let’s you hot swap between multiple accounts
Unfortunately there’s no way to export/import sub’s which I think should be a feature in the future. I’m not sure if you can access Lemmy.world content from another instance while it’s down maybe someone else can chime in on that.
Here is a good instance list that shows number of users. Seeing it really helped me understand why Lemmy.world is down. It has 22k users. The next largest has 4k. Most others barely scrape hundreds.
We are guilty as aspecies of tending
to choose the most popular option because it offers the most interaction. The enemy of federation is ourselves and cognitive bias. I am guilty as charged.
Here’s a good list to find reddit sub replacements on fediverse too very helpful
https://sub.rehab/
By the way, Awesome Lemmy Instances shows monthly active users, not total user counts. Your point still stands that lemmy.world has many more users than all the other ones tho.
According to lemmy.world admins, the downtime is caused by DDOS attacks, not big user count. I still think the large user count is part of the problem because I imagine it’s easier to DDOS one server with 120,000 users than 12 servers with 10,000 users
We are guilty as aspecies of tending
to choose the most popular option because it offers the most interaction.
I don’t understand what this means. If I compare the All tab between lemmy.world and a smaller instance like lemmy.ca, they are both pretty much identical. I don’t feel like I’m missing any interaction.
For small instances I can see why it’s a problem since at least one person needs to be subscribed to each community to federate the posts, but there are many instances that are big enough to not really have this problem.
Thanks for the info! What I meant by that was that traditional social media has always lived and died by popularity. People congregated to the most popular and thus most active sites and forms because they offered the most chance for interaction and someone Seeing what you write. There’s a reason why when everyone used reddit Digg faded to obscurity or when MySpace was replaced by FB. There’s probably some real life examples of this kind of mass congregation of social human beings leading to towns and whatever but that’s besides the point.
Federation changes the game in a fundamental way. No longer is the biggest centralized site the ‘best one’ instead a bunch of small instances can have more or less the same reach, content, and interaction as a big one. It will take some time for people who grew up with the rise of social media like myself to mentally adapt to the idea.
smugly points out other servers exist
correct me if i’m wrong, but i think if the instance your account is on is down you can’t interact with any other instances?
I think you may misunderstand. Let’s say Lemmy.world goes down, you are still free to make a new account on any other Lemmy instance and still have the same username (hopefully). Smokeydope@Lemmy.world simply becomes smokeydope@lemm.ee or whatever instance you make a new account on. A lot of instances federate with most other instances so you will more or less get access to the same content. A good Lemmy client like Voyager/wefwef.app let’s you hot swap between multiple accounts
Unfortunately there’s no way to export/import sub’s which I think should be a feature in the future. I’m not sure if you can access Lemmy.world content from another instance while it’s down maybe someone else can chime in on that.
Here is a good instance list that shows number of users. Seeing it really helped me understand why Lemmy.world is down. It has 22k users. The next largest has 4k. Most others barely scrape hundreds.
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
We are guilty as aspecies of tending to choose the most popular option because it offers the most interaction. The enemy of federation is ourselves and cognitive bias. I am guilty as charged.
Here’s a good list to find reddit sub replacements on fediverse too very helpful https://sub.rehab/
+1 on that import/export subs
You can use this to migrate your settings/communities:
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
By the way, Awesome Lemmy Instances shows monthly active users, not total user counts. Your point still stands that lemmy.world has many more users than all the other ones tho.
Here is a list that also shows total users: https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
According to lemmy.world admins, the downtime is caused by DDOS attacks, not big user count. I still think the large user count is part of the problem because I imagine it’s easier to DDOS one server with 120,000 users than 12 servers with 10,000 users
I don’t understand what this means. If I compare the All tab between lemmy.world and a smaller instance like lemmy.ca, they are both pretty much identical. I don’t feel like I’m missing any interaction.
For small instances I can see why it’s a problem since at least one person needs to be subscribed to each community to federate the posts, but there are many instances that are big enough to not really have this problem.
Thanks for the info! What I meant by that was that traditional social media has always lived and died by popularity. People congregated to the most popular and thus most active sites and forms because they offered the most chance for interaction and someone Seeing what you write. There’s a reason why when everyone used reddit Digg faded to obscurity or when MySpace was replaced by FB. There’s probably some real life examples of this kind of mass congregation of social human beings leading to towns and whatever but that’s besides the point.
Federation changes the game in a fundamental way. No longer is the biggest centralized site the ‘best one’ instead a bunch of small instances can have more or less the same reach, content, and interaction as a big one. It will take some time for people who grew up with the rise of social media like myself to mentally adapt to the idea.
They’re implying people can go make an account on those other instances to continue to use lemmy. Smugly.