This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.

However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.

You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.

  • radarsat1@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • TrippyTortuga@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      AFAICT no. There is an open issue on the Lemmy GitHub repo. In general, all ActivityPub services I’ve used have this same account stratification problem.

    • Einar@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I think this is key. Have the possibility to move an account to another instance or have it spread out somehow. This would also secure the account in case an instance dies for some reason.

    • Nick Cocklin@masto.ai
      1·
      2 years ago

      @radarsat1 @nutomic I’m still working this out myself, but you can browse Lemmy on any account, and then comment from your mastodon account by searching the commenter (@radarsat1 in the search field did it for me), and then replying to them on mastodon. Pretty cool how it’s linked, plenty of opportunities to build apps that make interacting between servers easier.

    • pingveno@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I would appreciate this as well. Besides the flood of users issue, this server’s theme (Marxist-Leninist) doesn’t mesh with my politics. I created my account in the early days of Lemmy, so I have an extensive history that I am loath to sacrifice.

  • TheYang@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 years ago

    Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @[email protected]

    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?

    • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I think they said they’re at the highest tier of their provider. May need to migrate to a different provider and get a beefier setup.

        • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          They do, but I’m not sure how well, I’m not a dev, and have no programming knowledge, so looking at the documentation looks like arcane hieroglyphs.

          I’m pretty sure I read a comment about it from one of the devs, but can’t recall the fine details of the conversation.

        • TrippyTortuga@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          In theory, they can. But it depends on how it’s deployed.

          From my cursory look at the deployment docs, Lemmy’s default deployment option is via docker. It relies on a postgreSQL server, which may or may not scale horizontally depending on the admin’s choice of implementation. For example, a deployment on AWS using Aurora would theoretically utilize auto-scaling.

          I haven’t personally deployed an instance so, grain of salt.

          EDIT: A good discussion about DB scaling here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3005

  • ionhowto@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Anders Rytter Hansen@rytter.me
      4·
      2 years ago

      @nutomic @ionhowto you dont have to sign up on multiple instances. if you want to comment a post on another instance, copy the url and paste in into the search field and then your current instance will fetch the post so you can comment on it.

      • ionhowto@lemmy.ml
        1·
        1 year ago

        What happens to the users of one instance when that instance is shut down or deleted? Searching for a url seems way too complicated. Can’t one subscribe to a server or sub category on a server?

        This I would really want it to work but it’s much worse to me than forums even.

    • NicoCharrua@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • GadgeteerZA@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Fediverse is the reverse of that - you sign up at one instance, and everyone can follow you from wherever they are. So you post in one place, get seen from everywhere else.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • gnoop@lemmy.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • ionhowto@lemmy.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      This is really the only way distributed has a chance to work but you won’t have much power as a server owner to ban users and be an edge Lord. Maybe the next things that comes up will be a true distributed network that also has incentives for people to spin-up new instances when needed.

  • Bilb!@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • vocornflakes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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. ¯\(ツ)/¯

    • Flannel Bear@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      There’s a website I highly recommend called fediverse observer, it doesn’t really go based on interest, but it has some other factors it uses and I really like it.

      • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        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.

  • lightrush@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

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

  • Slashzero@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    @[email protected] 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.

    • Provoked Gamer@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      I agree because this way, new users will learn what and how to use other instances. Plus, it also helps with finding more content, especially if the user picked an instance without many people which makes there be less communities and content they can check out on first glance.

      • Red Army Dog Cooper@lemmy.mlEnglish
        01·
        2 years ago

        I disagree because it makes the more narrowly focused topic or theme based instances more daluted, makes everything blur together more, I also see it as a detrament to the smaller intances because they will now there local comunity will have less traffic

            • gkd@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              2 years ago

              I think a client that might select a server for you by default (hopefully a trusted one of course) would make things way more easy to understand for the average user. Then making it easier to add or view communities on other instances.

    • Neil@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Except (as far as I’m aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.

  • Neptune014@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    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.)

  • highduc@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    It seems the lemmy.ml instance is really slow, times out, etc. I fear this will be a bad experience for new users migrating from reddit. Anything we can do? Any place to donate to scale it up, or would it be a good idea for existing users to migrate ourselves to different instances?

    edit: I did find the donate heart at the top. Not sure how fast that’ll improve things but I did make a small donation.