I’m not sure I understand. If I joined lemmy.world and subbed to stuff I like that has enough users to be interesting you’re saying, unsubscribe from those and join a different one with less users? I don’t know how that’s supposed to work?
Or are you saying join a different sever, log in there, and then pull the content from lemmy.world? That somehow helps with the load?
Lemmy is decentralized but completely connected together. I am on lemm.ee but I can still subscribe and comment to Lemmy.world or any number of other communities. The website you type in to visit Lemmy doesn’t matter. All Lemmy instances go to the same place. OP is arguing that a large centralized instance is bad which I don’t think anybody can disagree with. Lemmy.world has been down like every day. Tons of stability/DDOS issues but that only affects communities/users localized on that instance. Problem is that’s like half of the active Lemmy users right now.
Right but that doesn’t answer my question, is he literally just suggesting people go somewhere else?
To move somewhere else doesn’t mean to lose your subscriptions in the context of lemmy. What he means is if your main account on lemmy.world and it’s down, you won’t be able to (temporarily) access both your account(=your subs) and lemmy.world’s communities, while if your account on smaller (more stable) instance, it would only affect you by losing access to lemmy.world’s communities, but other subbed communities would still work/appear in your feed.
Hope that explains it.
I really want to see a data viz of whether/how much users are spreading out. Anyone got the data on user counts over time by instance?
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
Use 1m column for monthly active users
I started on lemmy.world, then decided to learn self-hosting server infrastructure and made my own instance. Found a script that allows me to “auto-discover” all communities from given instance URLs, so I just added the instances that interest me. Boom, I have an instance with all of my favorite instances searchable and discoverable on “All”.
For those interested in the script you can find it here. Do note that you should NOT use the default settings and make sure to use an instance whitelist, otherwise it’ll pull every instance ever.
Good advice or also just host your own instance will be a great way and its very simple to do that I feel anyone with some technical knowledge can do it by using Yunohost.
- Buy a domain using namecheap or cloudfare.
- Rent a VPS on Linode, Vultr , Digital Ocean or Hetzner
- Install Yunohost from the official website and be sure to install Debian 11 and not Ubuntu thats the one recommended by Yunohost developers.
- Once Yunohost is installed , set it up , add your domain , add a DNS record to point to the the server public IP.
- Now just installed Lemmy app from the Yunohost app store and thats it now you have your own lemmy instance.
wasn’t yunohost using an older version of Lemmy?
Its not always on the latest but its being really stable for me. I think they tested really throughly so thats why the updates are delayed but it just works.
Thanks for this! I just picked up a RPi4 and have been kicking it around trying to host a few applications and I’m just about to re-flash and start fresh. I’ll give Yunohost a shot tonight!
My steps were:
- Sign up for free Google cloud VM instance
- Buy a $3 domain name from Cloudflare
- Install with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
- Change Cloudflare to “Strict”
- Log in
What is a $3 domain? I really wanted to buy one like that cheap. Why change cloudfare to strict?
Honestly, I don’t even know. It was in the advanced settings on Lemmy-Easy-Deploy and I missed it and spent like 2 hours troubleshooting until I saw that, lol.
.win is a $3 domains on Cloudflare and shouldn’t have issues of being revoked (like .ml is going through and others could potentially face).
Oh yeah I just read about cloudfare strict but I think thats only if you proxied the request through cloudfare servers , if you just point the domain to the server I dont think you need to do that.
I bought the domain through Cloudflare and when setting the CNAME and A records it automatically proxied them so I didn’t even think about it at the time.
Yeah that is how it usually works. Well thank you for the info its been really helpful
We got almost 20,000 instances I don’t think we need to push people to self hosting unless that’s something they specifically enjoy.
No its 1376 instances and about 28000+ communities I believe.
It is a good point but are people really joining lemmy.world en mass still and if so why don’t the admins close registrations?
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Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.
Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.
Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.
It would still be better to have multiple “large” servers, instead of only one or two, which is currently the case. I really don’t think that it is a good thing to have a big difference between the biggest and the next biggest servers, as it effectively centralizes the content around the biggest instance.
I however agree that it doesn’t make sense to have tons of tiny instances.
I keep saying that the US needs to have its own big instance (or several) to host all those communities about US cities and sports teams that nobody else needs to care about, as well as potentially a good chunk of users and to exist as a large server alternative to lw.
People who see it this way are likely not from the US.
People who could make it happen must be from the US.
:-/
Not an option for me yet. Especially after I found out some instances federate messages slowly. Like up to an hour late slowly.
There isn’t any significant delay in the top 10 instances: https://aftershock.lemmy.management/public/dashboards/oT7pdcoeHWccpvZCNmTpJKoGZND8ZdRO3wDWpMug?org_slug=default
The only exception is dbzer0, but I guess they are upgrading at the moment
But this post is about smaller instances. Not the top 10
OP mentioned moving to Lemm.ee, which is top 5
That hasn’t been my experience. Unless 18.3 recently changed the situation.
We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance
But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.
If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.
But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.
There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.
Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.
That’s a good argument for bigger instances, but not one for using the largest one. Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works have more that 2k members, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com have 600 members, based on your argument their expected life expectantly is as long as Lemmy.world
But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.
You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.
Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won’t appear in everyone’s feed until I subscribe to it?
They don’t have to subscribe, but somebody has to have searched specifically for that community, so kinda yes.
People here promote scripts and bots so that an instance gets automatically subbed to new communities - which ok, but then which small instances really want to mirror the whole Fediverse? Most will run out of hard drive space, and we’re back at square one.
I mean, right now the main thing that would get me a better experience is seeing more activity, not less.
You see the same activity on Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com that on Lemmy.world, with the additional benefit of higher uptime (less likely to get targeted as hackers want to take down the Lemmy.world)
Not in All. The traffic in all is proportional to the number of subscribed communities of an instance, which is roughly proportional to the number of users.
Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works both have more that 2k users, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com has 600 users. With this amount of monthly active users, your needs for All are covered (most of the active communities will at least have one subscriber on your instance) except if you have very niche subs, which you would probably subscribe to by yourself.
I don’t get it why you’re downvoted. It’s 100% true. I’m here to discover new things, not to be in an echo chamber of my 5 subscribed comms.
You can discover using all from a 2k users instance as well as from a 30k users instance
There are these instance migration tools you can use to get things over to your new account.
GUI: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
too bad the ‘other’ lemmy world is spammed by communist propaganda
The other lemmy world?
@lemmy.ml
lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works (both more that 2k users), sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com (600 users). None of them has any communist propaganda.
And you can easily copy over all your subs/communities using Lasim, so the change to an account on a smaller instance is almost transparent.
Thanks for making this post, I feel like it can’t be repeated enough. People sit on Lemmy.world instead of creating an account somewhere else where they can literally read and comment on previous posts from Lemmy.world, and then it all gets synked when it’s up again.
It’s like email guys - the entire global email system doesn’t stop because your company email server has technical issues.
Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!
Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.
Hello fellow self hoster!
Did you get email to work :-D ?
What’s your hardware?
Cheers!
Hello there!
I’m running Lemmy via Lemmy-easy-deploy on Hetzner (so self-hosted as in: via a provider). E-mail is working via smtp2go and is indeed active :)
I moved to a smaller instance today. One thing that I’ve noticed that isn’t the same, is the Top All Time is showing different posts and vote counts on certain subs. I think I’ve noticed it only happens in the subs that I’ve interacted from the small instance for the first time. Or, if someone from my small instance interacted with it last week, there will be 7 days of history, but nothing beyond that. IDK if that’s true or not, just what I’ve observed today.
I’ve subscribed to all the same communities as when I was on lemmy.world, but my feed seems slower and quieter.
You are using lemmy.today, which as 12 monthly users based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list (the 1m column)
I would suggest trying out lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works (both more that 2k users), sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com (600 users). The previous link is usually a good way to find an instance that is populated, but not too much (the obvious bad choice being Lemmy.world)
