Lemmy

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 applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.

You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.

Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.

Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative...

I would be happy to use another instance but my account is on this one. Is there a way to migrate an account, or perhaps "link" accounts on multiple instances somehow?

lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.

If anybody else is lost and wants a basic general-purpose home for their account, https://lemm.ee is on good hardware and open for signups.

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?

This is inevitable if feddit is going to become mainstream. People have a herd mentality, if Lemmy is going to become popular there will always be a handful of instances that are much more popular than the others. These popular instances will need to scale (both vertically and horizontally) while the smaller instances will probably keep getting by with a single server. This is the same way email providers work, half the people I know use gmail, and most of the others use another large provider like yahoo or hotmail. It's just the way this is going to have to work. People want to join an instance with their friends, even if they're all federated together. They want to know that the instance they sign up for has peer approval and it's already a tried and trusted one.

If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.

For non technical users, the idea of instances can be a very confusing concept (the email analogy is a good one but its still confusing for people). I know you guys have a lot on your plate in terms of development wise, however I hope that prioritizing keeping lemmy.ml up is high up there. I say this because its the instance that most users from Reddit will flock to. And the last thing they need is to create an account then have the site go down for 6 hours. I havent experienced it going down. Although hopefully you have a backup site for when it does (what I mean is just a page that says your down/your working on fixing it... Try these instances instead.)

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 🎂

@nutomic@lemmy.ml what kind of hosting do you guys use for lemmy.ml? At the time of writing it looks like you have around 33k users and around 2k active. What does that look like for resources consumed?

First post for me!

Sorry, I applied and got approved here. Still waiting to hear back from beehaw…

I’m really digging this UI compared to Reddit, but I am 99.9% a mobile user via the native Reddit app (don’t @ me!)

I am very tempted to setup my own instance. Wondering what resource usage looks like for an instance.

I like to call Lemmy "Feddit".

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.

https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉

It seems like a common issue among ActivityPub services that people flock to the most popular instance and this causes problems. Why can't load balancing happen transparently? It seems like the main thing that actually makes a difference between which instance users want to join is what the moderation will be like. Like I don't want to be forced to sign up for an instance with a high amount of censorship compared to the rest of instances.

So maybe user registration should start from a centralized site that can describe the trade-offs of joining the various instances, and users don't get to select their specific instance by default, but rather they select based on a loose moderation policy, and then load-balancing occurs on the backend.

EDIT: I also want to be able to migrate between instances without losing my community subscriptions.

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.

At what point do you plan to close this instance to new users?

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!

is it possible to move an existing profile to a new server, like on Mastodon? or I need to create a new one and "start over"?

is there some kind of status page to have a look at and see how things are going? I cannot make any comments to a specific community at the moment and wondering why.

EDIT: Figured it out, when I tried to leave a comment via Jerboa I got an error "Language not allowed" and so I selected a language on the desktop site and then my comment went through. Note that this error does not appear on desktop site so I had no idea what was going on and why my comment was not going through

So, might I recommend having a button on the top bar that shows us the instances we've subscribed to, and maybe a quick link to the list of available instances? People like easy navigation, having to do multiple bookmarks or navigate through finding a link to the list of servers is not easy navigation.

Over at https://join-lemmy.org/ , when someone clicked on "Join a Server", they are presented with a list of instances, it's not that obvious that these are cross-accessible (yes, the homepage mentioned it, but not here), and people are bound to look for one with the most users.

Perhaps, add a simple TLI5 explanation/diagram explaining how Lemmy works on https://join-lemmy.org/instances .

(The documents are also too wordy for most people to care.)

@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.

What if I wanted to create an instance where upvotes are disabled? Could that be possible? @nutomic

I tried like 4 or 5 instances before coming to lemmy.ml, but none of them were taking applications anymore. Finding even those was a hassle, since all I got was a list of domains without any details as to what the instance is about or if they allowed newcomers.

Now that I've setup everything, Lemmy does seem like nice alternative to Reddit, but as someone from the outside, all of this is daunting.

Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.

Come join us at thebestinstance.com fam!

This is one of the biggest hurdles to get into Lemmy. I consider myself quite tech savvy but I am at a stage of my life that I cannot read hundreds of page of documentation just to use a forum.

There need to be a way to seamlessly move people from instance to another without them having to do it themselves or at the least a way way shorter documentation that goes to the point in one page.

Would be really nice if on the instance page you could have some extra information admins could fill in like max capacity and such, think that people would be more inclined to choose other instances if they could see how close the instance is to the approximate member limit