There are many lemmy instances in the world, but currently most people are using lemmy.world. This is why everything has gotten so slow.
You don’t have to delete your lemmy.world account, but check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map it’s a geo-based map of lemmy instances – explore stuff nearest you, pick one, sign up, search , subscribe and begin interacting with your favorite communities. It’s easy, free and it will be faster. Try it!
Really good advice.
The more we decentralize, the less any one server needs to pull all the load.
If you’re in central Europe, feel free to join mine!
I joined https://lemmy.myserv.one but I have to resubscribe to all my communities? How can you avoid this and have it automatic?
That’s exactly what preventing me from switching to a more obscure instance. I don’t want to redo my subs all over again
Kind of a big drawback and not the original impression I got when told all instances are federated so its the same everywhere and doesnt matter….
Switching might benefit lemmy.world but it was inconvenient and didnt benefit me much. The content is the same after resubbing but was a hassle. Unclear if I gained much personally doing it.
The benefit for you is that you will be in a low traffic instance. All the content you load will be loaded from that instance, not lemmy.world. So for you the content loads faster.
Like, I’m replying to you from lemmygrad.ml, and I’m never actually connecting to lemmy.world, and no content is loaded in real time from Lemmy.world. this comment will be synced back to lemmy.world and then synced out to everyone else that’s subscribed.
But if 90% of people are on Lemmy.world then naturally it’s going to run like ass.
I created this https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate to let you sync your different communities among your accounts.
Are there more detailed instructions somewhere? I learned python for like a week and not sure what to do exactly
Interesting. Too late as I resubscribed already but maybe will help others hopefully.
Damn, I wish I found this an hour ago! I just finished transferring over to blahaj.zone. I’ll definitely use this in the future!
I started on lemmy.world but am currently writing this from discuss.online, a lemmy instance I found in the greater NYC area because that’s where I’m based. It has the same access to all the communities and content that lemmy.world does and because it’s nearby and has fewer users it’s fast! Signing up and setting up my subscriptions only took a few minutes. I still have a lemmy.world account, but I don’t need to use it all the time.
Hi fellow discuss.online person!
I’m finding it has zero issues out here in Utah too. Just hoping it grows some additional communities outside of nerf for my local feed 😂
Wow, I did not expect there to be servers so close to me! Thanks for sharing this
Lemmy still feels pretty niche so I also found it surprising for me, although it probably shouldn’t be, there are quite a lot and they have to be somewhere :)
Wouldn’t this put me at risk of that smaller instance defederizing and removing everything I contribute while logged in to that instance?
This is whats kind of not clear to me. While its clear what the benefit is for lemmy.world or some instance you move from, its less clear what the benefit for the individual moving is such as myself. I have more risk, its a hassle, the smaller server might itself get overloaded or break. Sometimes it feels ‘safer in numbers’. Unsure. Feels like I would be best off if everyone else moved and took on the risk while I stayed and reaped the benefits of them reducing the load rather than me doing it.
Someone explained it a little better in another post. It will not erase my content. So if I’m logged in under my lemm.ee account but post on a lemmy.world instance. If for some reason lemm.ee got defederized, my post or comments would still be there at lemmy.world I would just not be able to use my lemm.ee account going forward.
It seems like this is the way to go like OP says
I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.
Mine has existed for a few years now, so I’m fairly confident it’ll exist for more
There is a very large range between tiny instance that can disappear overnight and “large instance”. The large instances are actually more likely to disappear as their hosting costs are beyond what a small group of admins can pay out of their own pocket easily, so they vitally depend on donations and that can break down easily for many reasons.
I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven’t seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I’m wrong).
There were certainly some that had to close registrations as their donation base was insufficient for the number of users trying to sign up. And others were sold to very questionable companies as they couldn’t finance themselves otherwise.
But that wasn’t my argument. We are talking about things that can go wrong with instances. Just because you didn’t see any large instances go down in this “nice weather” period, doesn’t mean they are resilient to serious shocks.
A small to medium sized instance that is basically run as a hobby by a few admins and is optimized for being cheap enough to not need donations is the much more sustainable and resilient instance.
Yeah but then you run into the risk of federation/defederation politics. We’ve already have had a major instance defederate.
That is why you would want to choose an instance that aligns with your values, so that if they defederate, it is to your benefit.
How is this related to instance size? There are large instances which defederate (I think most do), and small instances which do not.
If anything, I’d see it as an argument for joining small ones. There, your voice can have a bigger impact on federation decisions.
Mostly I think if you care about federation status, be sure to join an instance with a federation policy which you like.
Lemmy.world has only existed for a month. Why the confidence that it’s here to stay?
It’s run through the Open Collective, and is also run by Ruud who runs one of the larger Mastodon instances as well as some other stuff on the Fediverse I believe. They’re a fairly trusted actor in the space and I think pretty transparent with everything they do which is probably another reason many people flocked there.
I’m a little confused by your comment. What function does Open Collective serve other than simply as a fiscal host?
A reliable pipeline for donations, transparency and experience running large Fediverse servers (EDIT: list of Fediverse servers run by Ruud). You’re right that they’re not directly involved in running the server, I had misunderstood that and thought they were directly associated for some reason.
Open Collective is a funding platform unaffiliated with l.w
You’re absolutely right, I had completely misunderstood its involvement for some reason. Still, Ruud’s experience in the Fediverse running mastodon.world gives me reason to believe lemmy.world will be reliable too.
This is kinda neat. It would be awesome to be able to filter based on the attributes listed.
I’m gonna guess that just being on a less busy server will make the biggest difference. I moved from lemmy world and lemm.ee is super fast even though I’m pretty sure both are across the ocean from me.
I don’t understand personally why Lemmy.world isn’t utilizing load balancing (specifically, horizontal load balancing). Is it due to budget concerns?
There are challenges with horizontal scaling due to the way that Lemmy is architected. Sounds like this will be a priority for them to improve
For all we know it’s hosted in an old laptop in someone’s basement right?
The dev, Ruud (User Profile), who runs Lemmy.world also runs another Fediverse instance, Mastodon.world. If you go to Mastodon.World you can see their blog posts which talks about their infrastructure and Expenses.
https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
The VPS package they’re hosted on runs for almost $600 a month with a massive CPU, memory, and storage. I suspect now the expenses are increasing due to the massive influx of users. Now imagine Reddit’s costs serving over a billion people across the planet - Multi-million dollar contracts between Reddits and other corporations, tens of thousands of full-time salary jobs of engineers and devs, etc.
Running a Lemmy instance on an old laptop is extremely trivial. But serving Lemmy to tens of thousands of users is expensive and difficult. Lemmy will improve over time and hopefully we’ll see load balancing and horizontal scaling in the future. I’d love to see additional containers get spun up during large spikes of capacity.
The only instance in my country has “cult” as the 1st word in its name.
Philippenis moments
Sounds like a good time
I suppose it’s not the Cult of the dead cow…?
An export/import for “subscribed” communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.
There needs to be a “MigrationPub” spec to export your info to be ready to import into another user login.
Theres a userscript. Check at !plugins@sh.itjust.works
Can you link the post? I’m not able to find it.
I think it was this one?
Thanks! That helps!
Ah I’m having trouble now too. I know I saw one somewhere. I’ll update if I find it.
There are two things being discussed here. The first is the original suggestion of the account you’d log into and use as a server for pulling information. The other some have mentioned is the location of communities. They both share similar problems in an overloaded or defunct instance situation, but need different solutions.
For the account I think just one main thing needs developing, and that’s the ability to share a profile across different logins. So you can have two or three different logins, but you have the same settings and when people interact with you they see you as the same umbrella/main account. I’m not sure how this could work outside Lemmy, like kbin or even Mastodon without being part of the protocol itself, but maybe that’s a long range idea. There’s also the problem of name collision since there’s enough accounts now that duplication is probably a thing. The choice right now is limited to just making accounts in a few places and see if things are better/same/worse there before you get too invested with customizing your stuff.
For instances - I had seen a suggestion of having a grouping ability between different instances that wanted to share or mirror each others content, basically an automated cross-posting. This would allow multiple instances so if one has some problem, the content still exists. There’s lots of caveats with that I’m sure, but one of the laments from many Redditors is the loss of resources, and that really should be a high priority to make sure that content is both preserved and available. For now the best we can do is make communities in a few places and cross-post the more important things so more people read and respond to it.
lemmy.world was an instance I tried and call me an impatient spoiled brat, but it’s not usable for me because it’s so darn slow. It’s much better to join a smaller instance. It doesn’t even have to be in the country you’re connecting from. sh.itjust.works is in Canada, I am in Western Europe, it’s snappy AF. And less toxic btw. kbin.social is pretty awesome, though. Loads up for me nice and fast with more content I want to see. I’ve settled on kbin as my place to go, but there are other instances that are just as fantastic. The lesson I learned: lemmy.world might be the big general instance and it might wish to claim to be “the front page of the internet” but it’s bogged down and too slow. It also wasn’t fun for me when I could actually use it. You know, because of the usual. Too much bickering and too much meta stuff. It’s much better to join the communities hosted on lemmy.world from another faster instance. You get snappier loading up of content and you avoid their whole home page which, at the moment, is just a meta victim.
I am planning on moving to lemmy.blahaj.zone soon-ish but I have 2 questions.
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How do I move to another instance?
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Can I move freely? For example, could I switch to lemmy.blahaj.zone to lemmy.world to kbin.social every day? I don;t like the idea of being “tied down” to an instance for a long time.
you can have accounts on multiple instances, go ahead and sign up. your info is NOT transferred, so you’ll need to re-subscribe to your communities, and your posts stay on the instance you wrote them from.
As far as I know, account migration from one instance to another is currently not possible on kbin/lemmy but with the sudden influx of users and developers I believe it is on the roadmap for at least kbin and likely lemmy too. For now you’ll have to use multiple accounts, but eventually you should be able to migrate if you choose to.
I may wait until that becomes possible, although if the wait is long, I’ll make a new account.
Yeah do whatever you decide is best! No right way to do it. Some have suggested just considering accounts temporary as we all experiment with what works best until more features are rolled out. But I know I’m already attached to my existing accounts and reluctant to make more.
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