Does it actually matter?
Lemmy.world because lemmy.ML recommended it when I tried to sign up there. I’m considering moving to a smaller server though since this one seems to be getting overloaded.
Same, feeling really slow for me
Yea, for whatever reason, lemmy.world became the sort of de facto “main” instance, which isn’t a bad thing and lemmy.world isn’t a bad choice at all, ruud AFAICT is a dedicated and experienced fediverse admin.
There may be issues to centralising the user load too much. I don’t have the technical knowledge to back this up, but it probably makes sense that there is such a thing as too much for one server to handle. If it has to handle all of the user requests as well has syncing all of the large and popular communities that a “main” instance is likely to host, then it’s just a lot and probably requires technical solutions and investment beyond what one admin/team is willing or capable of doing. Plus, lemmy the software may not be designed for that sort of load, which probably requires a distinct architecture from that of a smaller instance.
So it probably, at point at least, makes sense to spread the load of both the users and the communities. However, it seems that redditors as accustomed to a “central” and singular service as they are have kind of opted in to re-creating a central “main” instance like they’re used to. It may very well be a bad habit, as it presumes that there’s just some giant server and a dedicated tech team sitting there waiting to scale up at a moment’s notice. Of course, lemmy.world are free to halt sign ups and encourage users to pick other instances. But it remains to be seen how lemmy, its software and the fediverse/threadiverse in general handles communities/groups/magazines at this new scale.
In the mean time, intentionally spreading the load might help. As would donating to the developers and your admin!!
I have the technical knowledge to back it up, and I confirm your understanding is spot on.
Thanks!
Can we pick your brain on this?
For a big instance getting an over-sized user base … roughly how many would that be and what could the instance do about it? I’d imagine a number of infrastructural things could be done before the core lemmy code base and design needs to be substantially changed or redesigned. Big separate database service, big beefy primary server/instance or even a cluster like kubernetes (which is what mastodon.social use AFAIK).
As for the alternative where many users are distributed more even across many instances, how well would that or can that scale with all of the community data that would need to be synced up between all the instances? From what I’ve gathered, it’s precise this kind of work that’s plagued lemmy.world somewhat and caused some of the issues that users have been having, largely, it seems, from the server being overloaded with “federation workers” timing out.
I can’t answer those questions because some active work would need to be done to get those insights, but those are the right questions to ask indeed.
I think my immediate assumption would be that the scale metrics that could end up starving resources would be something like: number of users on the current instance, number of posts on the current instance, number of comments on the current instance, number of new signups per minute on the current instance, number of new posts per minute on the current instance, number of new comments per minute on the current instance, number of total posts across all federated communities, number of total comments across all federated communities, number of new posts per minute across all federated communities, number of new comments per minute across all federated communities. That’s my list and I could be wrong about it since I know almost nothing about the underlying architecture, it would take a bit of team work to make it comprehensive.
From there, someone architect-level who knows the solution well should be able to prioritize that list. For instance: “the number of federated posts doesn’t concern me much, because we fetch the contents themselves directly from other instances, and if the concern is the size of the DB table, the number of comments will hit much higher much earlier anyway; so let’s look at comment stuff before we look at post stuff”. I have no idea if this is accurate, but you get the idea.
And then from there, you want to perform some load-testing. So, for instance, setting up two air-gapped test instance that can only federate each other, and injecting a ton of fake data to hit higher and higher numbers on the listed metrics. While that’s going on, all relevant resource usage (CPU, memory, …) would be monitored, to see what resource usages grow faster than comfortable.
With those results, you’d want to go back to current resource usage on real-world instances, and that should allow to extrapolate and prioritize. Like: “well, lemmy.world’s local posts are growing at that rate, and we’ve measured that the related metric only gets in trouble around that number, so basically at current rate we have 6 months to figure it out”.
And from there, you now know the problems, and can prioritize the solutions, based on urgency and cost. Some may be low-cost, there may be easy computations to parallelize or shard for instance; but of course you’d have to know what the worst ones are first, in order to tackle them in order. And then of course, some of them will probably be very tricky to get past.
One thing I can tell you is that, without knowing much of Lemmy’s architecture, I have the same intuition you do, that the decentralization of it will help mitigate with some resource usages in ways that Reddit couldn’t, for instance; but not all. I’m pretty sure that as instances add content, something grows in ALL instances federating that content, which might starve some critical resource at some point in all of them.
Yeah I’ve noticed some issues lately with lemmy.world. I assume it has to do the quick growth from the great Reddit migration.
lemmy.world has literally doubled its number of active users in the past few days, so yeah it’s a pretty safe bet.
Welcome to the $bigProvider to Fediverse Migration Experience. This is how everyone starts off their journey.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Went Lemmy.world because I had no idea how any of this worked.
Gonna stick with it for now, because there isn’t really a reason to switch. In the future I might switch or host my own.
I choose lemmy.world because it let me create an account nothing more. When RIF closed up, they suggested Lemmy, so I popped on. I am sure it will be a while before there is a lot of content, but I can be patient. I do hope that Reddit enjoys the fruits of the bitterness they’ve sown. The Anti-social network.
I chose lemm.ee because:
- Its admin @[email protected] has been working hard at improving the instance’s performance and fixing issues.
- It has been relatively smooth and performant since the infrastructure upgrade.
- The domain name is cleverly satisfying.
Did you know that .ee is the Estonian tld? Estonia in Estonian is Eesti. Sunaurus is from Estonia and runs the c/Eesti community. The Estonian language is one of the few living relatives of the Finnish language (a member of the Finnic language family).
Thanks God
Do we do c/rimjobsteve here or should we leave that behind?
Yes. I realy enjoyed this instance so far. I joined during the black out protest and first looked at lemmy.me, but they said they had performance issues and didn’t realy want any new sign ups. Just scrolled for a bit and stumbled upon lemm.ee, with a beautiful welcome message and another massage how he upgraded the servers. Just new this was the way to go. Such a nice owner, who actually cares how our experience on this platform is.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
- Googled “Lemmy” to see what it even is
- “wtf is an instance”
- Checked some of the most used instances. At this point I wasn’t sure if it matters much, but I just figured it’s best to just pick a popular instance.
- found lemmy.world, and the description goes “The World’s Internet Frontpage - Lemmy.world is a general-purpose Lemmy instance of various topics, for the entire world to use.”
- “sounds good enough”, created account
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
I’m on sh.itjust.works. Not gonna lie, related to that name naturally.
Exactly the same for me. Choosing an instance based on values, content, or location is so lame. I chose my instance based on the funny name.
Although sh.itjust.works democratic moderation is pretty based.
There is several of factors you should consider:
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Does it have a healthy amount of users: between 1k-10k users are probably the sweet spot right now. You don’t want too many users because it will cause performance problems. And instances with too few users has too many unknowns.
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read the rules see if you agree: servers can have wildy different rules ranging from no NSFW to no downvotes. If they don’t have any rules that is a red flag too. You want an active moderation so the instance doesn’t get run over by bots.
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Does it look low effort: check the banner, how the announcement formatted.
That is probably all the basics
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I chose Lemmy.world, because it was the one I was hearing the most about. It’s a bit slow at the moment, but that’s not surprising, given the amount of new users. So far it’s been fun. I really hope more and more people show up!
All that matters is you shouldn’t recommend the already massive overloaded servers like lemmy.world when lemmy isn’t even optimized for this sort of traffic on a single server yet, and those large servers are having issues because of it. The entire point of decentralization is to spread out and still be connected.
Recommend smaller general servers that have been up for years and also upgraded for the surge of users, like lemmy.one, lemm.ee, or vlemmy.net
For others…
If you’re Canadian lemmy.ca has also been great. There is an application but I was approved in less than 4 hours answering the 4 simple questions.
They’ve also recently rejigged the administration and just upgraded to a brand spanking fast server this canada day
Lenny.ca wouldn’t let me visit a lot of communities though
Like which?
Nerf
I’m on lemmy.sdf.org because it’s widely federated and run by a trustworthy organization.
I’m not much of a tech bro - in fact I struggle with troubleshooting basic Linux issues. That’s why I mostly interact outside of my local instance.
I hardly engage with the techy discussion on SDF, but I appreciate the high quality user base.
I’m also on SDF. They’ve been in the business of offering free computing resources to the public since the 80s. So I feel confident that they won’t close up shop due to lack of expertise or resources.
I was going to come in here and praise SDF but I see I’m too late
Damn you Dark Souls Remastered for taking me away from Lemmy for a bit!
I guess I’ll link the FAQ for SDF here for anyone interested in learning more
and also mention that SDF runs a Mastodon and Pixelfed instance for all your federation needs
I’m also late to the party. But I’ve been on SDF for ages so I always try out everything they offer.
