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 π
this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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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.
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I use kbin too.
New to this feedverse or how you call it.
Why isn't there one login that can post on all platforms and I have to signup on each separately?
If there is, you're not making it obvious I guess.
You can post on all platforms.
I'm on lemmy.ca and I can make posts and comments on lemmy.ml just fine.
On Jerboa its just as easy as posting on your own instance. Idk how it works on the website but I'm sure there's a way.
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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 itβs an instance, surely. I tried to comment on their post, but was required to sign in.. Iβm already signed in over here, I gotta sign in there, too? Anyhow I tried to sign in with my lemmy.ml creds but that didnβt work. How can I interact with posts there?
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!
This is a great one! Might use it
Keep it simple with lemmy.itjust.works.
If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.
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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.
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?
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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 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.
IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that's going to create performance problems.
We'll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.
I think that there should be some meaningful way to "preview" aspects of one instance that may make it more attractive than another instance to a new user. I just joined lemmy.world today simply because it seemed the most generic. Onboarding process could use some work; https://lemmy.world/post/37906 is great at explaining it but people will only really see it for the first time once they join...
Also I have no clue if that second link works. Β―\(γ)/Β―
No problem just make a pull request with your changes.
You probably don't want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)
That said, I dig what y'all are doing, and I'm veteran experience / interaction designer who's been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.
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.
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.)
Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin πͺ, you upgrade.
@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.
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New user,how do I donate / tip to help you peeps cover server costs? It wasn't directly obvious how to do it; apologize if it's a big button right on a page that I missed.
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