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2y ago

lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead

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.

494 comments

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!
- 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?
  
  I name everything as var1 var2 etc.
  
  There are only two hard things in CS: naming things, caching, and off-by-one errors.
  
  choosing the name for my instance was easy. programming related? programming.dev it is!
- 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
  
  can't wait for fedd.itjust.works to go online!
  
  Keep it simple with lemmy.itjust.works.
  If you get this going or need a hand then let me know.
  
  Do you also have a few million dollars under your mattress? 😁
- YetAnotherLemmy.Social coming online now soon?
- 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.

Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You're welcome there.

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.
- I think you probably underestimate how far one can get with "vertical" scaling. Here's the dockerfile: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/release/v0.17/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml
  It includes 4 different containers... so there's a way to scale out to 4 machines right away. Maybe not every container is doing an equal amount of work... but there's some amount of immediately available machine-splitting.
  I'm no expert, but I believe that at least the lemmy and lemmy-ui containers are stateless. If so, they're horizontally scalable already.
  Postgres then would likely be the main bottleneck. But postgres offers read-replicas, so again the write-load and the read-load can be hosted on separate machines. And if there's enough read-load, you can have many replicas.
  Other comments from the admins have shown that lemmy.ml today is running on a single eight-core box and it's currently hosting 30k registered users and over 1k active. So how much more compute capacity can we throw at "vertical" scaling on the current software architecture?
  Just by going to a bigger single box, we can get 128 cores with no problem, a 16x bump in capacity. Does that get us to at least to 300k registered + 10k active?
  Splitting the containers onto 4 separate machines. Does that get us 2x more?
  Adding PG read-replicas and additional lemmy/lemm-ui containers would allow us to expand our instance footprint to maybe 6 physical machines should get us another 2x or more in performance.
  Conservatively, that's 100x the computing capacity of the current hardware and could potentially support 1m registered users and 50k active. Now, I don't REALLY expect this to be possible today, there will be many software bottlenecks found along the way to scaling a single instance this large. But my point is that there's already a medium amount of horizontal scalability built into lemmy, and if the software doesn't fall over for algorithmic reasons (which is will at first), the current infrastructure architecture allows quite a lot of growth. There's plenty of time between now and a federation of million user instances to adopt a truly distributed storage backend if needed.
  
  Doesn't solve the availability issues, though. I know of no seriously hosted system that doesn't have at least two replicas in different availability zones. I don't expect any hobby instance to offer any kind of availability guarantee. But if we want to have one or two central instances that the typical reddit user can flock to, this would IMO be essential to have.
  Also, in my experience it is FAR cheaper to have a few low to mid range systems for vertical scaling, than to throw a high end machine at it for vertical scaling. If you look the the pricing, the monthly costs for vertical scaling goes up exponentially once you want much more RAM and CPU cores (and storage, and so on).
  Being able to scale horizontally solves both issues: hardware is cheaper and reliability is higher.
  That lemmy is so damn efficient would then simply mean, that we can achieve excessively good results with low resources, where Reddit would already struggly and needs to put much more machines in place. That would be a nice "business" advantage.
- i've been saying we need a COBOL/CICS implementation of ActivityPub for YEARS and it's always the same "where the hell am i supposed to get a 3270 in 2023" and "what do you mean i can't shitpost during the batch window"
- 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.)
- unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^
  🎼The stranger there among them had a big iron on his hip🎶
  
  gotta love a good gamer-flavour mainframe

@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.
- 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.
  
  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

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.
- Not sure why you reference Matrix, which has even worse scaling issues as it indeed tries to replicate nearly the entire network on every server.
  The Fediverse is really just working how the general web does, just with some standardized API for websites to interact. It's not perfect, but it works and has proven to be relatively scalable.
  It sounds a bit like you had a bit too much of the Bluesky cool-aid, which indeed replicates nearly all of the mistakes of Matrix and makes it impossible to scale via small community owned servers instead of big company owned data-centers (which might be by design?).
  
  Well yeah, point taken that replicating everything everywhere and forever might be impossible. But I do believe at a minimum my identity should be portable and accessing Fedi (ie. in microblogging: posting and viewing a feed of the latest posts of my follows) should be decoupled from which instance I pick to access the Fediverse.
  I don't particularly like how owners of instances which grew are now essentially locked in to having to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars a month keeping their now expensive instances running and providing service. This is a bad place to be for a platform ran by volunteers. Letting instance owners scale their service down as well as up would be ideal. But this requires at least decentralized identity, and at best some form of content hosting redundancy...
  It's easy to say the current architecture of Fedi works when it's still small. Your instance has 139 users.. That's not intended as a slight. Hosting instances is good and I applaud you for it! But I wish it were easier to more equally share the load once the platform becomes more popular.
- Yeah, the fact that the user auth and permission models were intentionally left out of the W3C spec initially really ended up locking ActivityPub into particular dialects and patterns that are now proving problematic for scaling.
  I’m not sure it’s 100% too late for a redesign, though. The committee is still active and the Fediverse could still theoretically grow by an order of magnitude or two. Does that seem likely right this minute? No, but sometimes that kind of vision is what an ecosystem needs.
- Thank you for posting this, as you seem to have more knowledge of the underlying protocols than i have. Had some visions of server takedowns and meltdowns. I have little idea how the protocol works but i'd imagine that account migration/replication would not be such a big deal to implement, and communities are already being replicated, no? As a work-around.
- 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.
  
  Following a decentralized identifier would essentially be like following a unique public key. Their screen name is just some text which can be anything. The bigger problem is the overall infrastructure of Fedi which is very much based on lists of user@domain .. this no longer trivially works if the "user" you follow could be posting from anywhere. It doesn't seem unsolvable, just kind of difficult to imagine with the momentum behind Fedi as it is right now.
- 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.

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.)
- Pull requests welcome, the code is here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site

Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.
- Here they list them:
  https://join-lemmy.org/donate
  EDIT: shoutout to the madlad who donated $1,000!
  
  Thank you. Did the thing.
  
  Many thanks, dropped 10mBTC.
  
  Thank you, dropped a few buckeroos :)

I have been wondering how cumbersome the Lemmy design will become for some. I love the idea that it is federated and decentralized however these are also major drawbacks for most average users (i.e not multi account users.
Multiple accounts needed for maximum uptime on different instances. What if I really like my username and its taken on another instance? If one instance is down and i comment with my other account will i then need to manage replies etc through different profiles? What happens if something spins up another instance of a similar domain so that they can get a username of someone to imitate them? I am sure these can be blocked after the fact or will other federated instances be automatically blocked.
What happens when someone gets bored of their instance and stops it, or it gets blocked, or they start getting unwanted attention. Does this mean all that content then goes into the ether?
Will this go down the route of whomever provides the instance with the most resources, best load balancing becoming the one, blocking other instances and controlling it as if it were private and independent?
There are a lot wait and see things, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.
- I've experienced a taste of this already. I checked the instance list a couple days ago, and didn't see one that stood out for my interests, so I created an account on the main lemmy.ml instance.
  I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I've done and all the communities I've subscribed to, I have to do over again.
  -----
  Another "issue" (a bug or feature?) I'm seeing is there are a lot of duplicate communities between the instances. I guess one will eventually "prevail" and become the defacto instance for that community.
  
  I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community
  Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like "gaming"), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.
  
  I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.
  I believe what you did was necessary. There's a bug for account export and transfer to another instance, but it's still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506. It doesn't appear that Lemmy has an account migration feature like Mastodon does, and consequently you've got to migrate your settings manually and then leave some kind of post or link in your old profile to where the new profile is.
  
  That's me right now.
  Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn't have communities I want.
- These are some issues I've been thinking about as well.
  What's to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance? Maybe there should be a distributed user index amongst instances to prevent duplicate usernames?
  I think making the federalized infrastructure incumbent upon users to understand and select is not something the average user is going to bother with. This is complicated problem, I don't know the answer might be off the top of my head.
  And what happens when an instance goes down? Does every user and their history get torched? Is there a migration process or at least a decommissioning policy in place?
  
  Trolls impersonating the Lemmy developers has happened in the past. best is to report this to the instance admins who can delete the accounts as from the post history it is usually clear who the imposter is. Not sure if there can be a better way to handle this, probably not?
  
  What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance?
  Mastodon can have (has?) the same problem. This is somewhat solved with the self-verification process though, so it could be done similarly on Lemmy.
- You made some good points. We often forget that most people have trouble with simple technical concepts, and the mere fact of having no simple and straightforward answer to "where do I register?" Is something that can inibit a lot of users.
  This happens so much in the open source world. Things that are obvious to us can be difficult to others, but open systems aren't designed for the general public.

Another thing:
We do need more site admins to help us handle the applications and moderation.
For obvious reasons, we prefer ppl who have been here for a long time, and post / comment consistently. If you'd like to help us out, so that nutomic and I can focus on coding, that would be splendid.
- I'd raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it's probably not a good idea :)
  
  We'd love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.
- I can handle some applications daily, and I'm also planning to grow some more niche communities :)
- I'm happy to help if needed :)
- I mean I'd love to help - either modding someone's server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)
- If needed, I'd also be more than happy to help.

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.
- Exactly, can't join another instance if they don't accept your application.
- This list may help newcomers:
  https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
- Yeah, I can agree. I applied at two instances and found one that did not have the questions and allowed me to make and verify. Once I got in, it's not too bad. I took a peek here first and saw the posts mentioning using All to see the instances, and then it opened a bit more.

I sent my registration yesterday, because I signed in another instance, one from my country, but I couldn't see all the post and no comments from lemmy.ml even thought is supposedly linked, so thank you for approving my account.
Even if I'm a tech savvy person I found the whole experience of joining lemmy pretty bad, I like the concept of federation, but I think it's too confusing to normal people, it really needs to be more seamless if you want to grow, how? idk, I was thinking some sort of replication, when you sign up, you are registered to the main instance (this) and given the choice to select other instances, automatically selecting let's say another 3 based on your location, then your account is synced in all the registered and linked instances, when you login if an instance is experiencing overload then it switches to another one. I don't know if this is realistic or out of the scope of Lemmy, or maybe against the philosophy of it. I'm just rambling.
I'm just glad that there is an open alternative for anonymous social interaction in this day of walled internet services such as discord, twitter, facebook etc. and I wish you all the success.
- Agreed, someone needs to create an easy "sign up here" with a default option (maybe just randomize across various instances, not sure)
  
  Randomizing would cause lots of issues since each instance has different rules and philosophies. It’s a difficult problem to solve.
  
  https://join-lemmy.org/
- I found it rather easy to get signed up, just had to wait for the admin to actually approve the application. Otherwise it was pretty easy.
  However, I do see a HUGE benefit to "load balancing" as you are mentioning. Where you sign up for a master server and then replicated to the others that are more applicable. I'm surprised this isn't already a process as this is very common in gaming and proxied sites.
  
  Yeah the registration itself was easy like any other site, I was talking more about grasping and understanding the concept of instances and how they interact.
  And as someone said in another comment, the see all posts options should be the default in your home and community search or you feel like in a dessert island when you are new to all of this.
- Yeah, federated logins of some sort would be really nice to have. There have been some mentions of integrating something from Streams onto Lemmy.

If now is struggling then on June 12 will be a nightmare.
Reddit will go dark in protest, many messages to join Lemmy, most instances will be overloaded or even DDoS with so many users, like what happen with Mastodon.
- @Generator And just like Mastodon and the fediverse at large, after initial growing pains, we will find a way
  @nutomic
  
  Not only fediverse, back in the day when reddit was cool servers outages was a daily thing

I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.
- Pull requests welcome, here is the repo:
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site

Is there any way to migrate instance or do I make a new account entirely?
- You have to make a new account unfortunately.
  
  Seems like this should be a high priority feature. I did try joining a different instance but at the time only lemmy.ml was functioning and accepting applications. Now that I have subscribed to a bunch of communities starting afresh would be a bit of a hassle.

I just created https://lemmy.studio/ for music-related discussions.

Users are likely going to see this as it's the "official" Lemmy instance when trying to join for the first time.
Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!
- Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!
  I just want to contribute where I can 😅

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.

It's good to be popular. Congratulations on the growth!

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?

Got my instance running earlier today thanks to some helpful people in the Matrix chat. Intention at the time was to have some friends of mine join but I'm not opposed to having signups as well. Long live open source, federated software!
- Yay, congrats!

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 guess every bigger instance needs to constantly promote a monthly support fee to keep the servers runnin. Something that most people already use and don't have to register first. Like PayPal or Patreon.
Edit: And I support Lemmy now on Patreon.
- Link?
  
  https://join-lemmy.org/donate

Is there any way to transfer an account to a different instance?
- There is an issue open for this at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506, but it's not addressed yet. To migrate, you'd have to:
  Manually create a new account.
  Manually copy your settings.
  Create a post, comment, or set your profile description to point to your new account so people can manually find you at your new account.
  Your existing comments and posts would stay associated with your current/old account.
  I wouldn't sweat it though. It's not currently "broken", and the lemmy.ml admins can shut off new signups if it becomes a major problem. My take is this is more about directing new signups elsewhere. The one instance can't hold every new user that's signing up right now.

Is there a feature to send a read-only/static link to Lemmy pages?
I’m envisioning a pre-cached version of the page that is updated hourly or so, rather than querying the database live for every comment on the thread. In a perfect world, these could also be offloaded to a CDN as static pages…
- That's basically what Reddit does when you're not logged in (and a bunch of similar sites too I guess).

If server crashes again the devs should just stop all registrations to this instance, people always follow path of least resistance and the first dev instance is just too easy to be stuck onto
- This option seems pretty nice. Especially if, when refused entry, there is an easy link to browse other instances.
  
  would be nice to put a notice saying new user registration temp disabled. or on the join page the instances with disabled registration get hidden or pushed down
- That's what Mastodon servers were doing after Twitter.
  
  Mastodon.social didn't have load issues though, they just wanted to promote federation for the health of the network, and growth slowed down considerably because of it. Not that it was a bad move, but if lemmy wants to absorb reddits userbase it will not work, because elon musk isn't a constant presence of vile encouraging migration unlike on twitter. reddit knows how to manage negative users, just look at what they did about alien blue. 4 years of premium and all was forgotten/forgiven.

I know I'm being a bit pushy at this point, but distributing instance load can be helped in some part by merging this PR and deploying the latest changes (including more languages and recommended instances as well) :)
- Looks like it was just merged

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.

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

I just created https://lemmy.film if that would be useful for anyone.

Sorry for contributing towards this by registering but I'm very appreciative of the work being done to facilitate this community. I hope to see Lemmy grow with the negative direction other platforms are taking.

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.

Is there anyway to scale an instance by adding more nodes? Not be adding additional instances, but more of a distributed load balancing for a given instance? What about migrating communities to a different hardware instance? What scaling challenges does Lemmy face that something like Mastondon doesn't?
I'm sure there are many folks (myself included) who have technical resources that are not community builders. I'm sure if there if there is a way to spread the load, enough folks want this to succeed to make it work.
- This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.
  Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won't necessarily help with the load. What's needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that's not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL...)

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?

well, what can be done to help with upgrades to this server? what does that entail?
- This site is hosted on a VPS from ovh.com. I upgraded it from 4 vCPU to 8.
  
  fascinating. what's the monthly cost increase to go to 12 or 16 cpus? cuz that's gonna happen, and I should set aside some cash for a donation.
  
  Can an instance be distributed across multiple machines?

I'm a noob. I created an account on beehaw and on lemmy.ml. That's because I see communities on one instance that I'm interested in and a different community on another instance. So if there's a technology community on both, how do I get to see all the technology posts without having to have two accounts?
This is really confusing for noobs like me. I'd just like to see one community to technology, one for Science, one for nintendo etc. I don't care it it's spread out amongst different servers to divvy up the load, but from the user side, it needs to be seamlessly integrated.
I'm still learning how all this works though. But I don't know how many folks that are more casual than me will be willing to figure it out. I hope they do though! It'll be worth it to leave reddit in the rearview mirror!
Edit: lawdy, I just figured it out. Local vs all on the communities list. It was right in front of my face. good grief!
- Simple: subscribe to both. Ever seen how many /r/trueX subreddits there are (where X is any popular subreddit)? That's basically what's going on here.
  
  It still might be nice to be able to combine communities into a single view, kind of like a multireddit. If there's a technology@beehaw.org and a technology@lemmy.ml, I want to see them both on the same screen without having to jump between them. This isn't currently possible, right?
- there should also be a “subscribed” option that’ll show you posts from only the communities that you’ve subscribed to across all instances

Soo, stupid question maybe but how does federation work with your own instance?
I've set up a solo instance using ansible and subscribed to !lemmy@lemmy.ml. If I wanted my ALL page populated with posts from other lemmy.ml communities, would I have to subscribe to each individually? Or does my instance fetch lemmy.ml's Local eventually?
I've confirmed that federation is working using the method described in lemmy's docs and lemmy.ml (+ a few other instances) is listed under "Allowed instances" in my admin panel.
- From what I can tell, it won't automatically pull in all communities from another instance - it'll only "know" about a community once someone has searched/subscribed to it, unless I'm missing something.
  Also just as a heads up, explicitly specifying allowed instances puts the federating onto an allow-list only sort of mode I believe - if you want to allow federating with all instances you can do so by leaving that field blank (and putting in explicit entries into the blocked list will ignore requests/connections from those instances). Of course, if that's intentional then my apologies! 😅
  
  Good to know, thanks! In that case some way to discover and promote global communities would be really helpful. Does any of the instances have something like this?
  And yep, had to remove the allowed instances as your comment was not showing up (and now I can't reply from my own instance, probably takes a few minutes to fetch it now that the Allowed list is empty).
  
  If they are using allowed instances they probably can't see your comment.

Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?
- You have to create a new account. But that's easy ;)
  
  That's kind of wrong though, isn't it? What about stuff like GDPR data exports? Users should be able to export their data, then import it into another instance, effectively migrating instances.

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"?
- Right now, there is no import/export. It's a known useful feature, but the devs have no time to work on it (I've been following all the optimization work they've been doing on github, I don't know if they sleep). You'll have to start over atm, sorry.
  
  thanks for the quick answer!
  
  That's a bummer but it is good to know.
- Currently you have to start over.

Are there any published guidelines on the server requirements for an instance? I have my own instance running, seems to be working fine. But I'm reluctant to open it publically without an idea of if I'm setting myself up for failure or not.
Related, is there a way to entirely disable image uploads to my instance? I'm ok with it being a "reader" instance, but don't want to be hosting content directly.
- The backend especially is not too demanding (thanks to using a compiled binary via Rust). The database demands probably scale, but postgres scaling is relatively well understood. I think right now the least scalable parts look like the frontend node and websocket stuff, but that can be improved. I'm not sure how I feel about Activity Pub protocol wise, it feels pretty chatty, so transit scalability might be something else to consider.
  
  We are currently removing websocket and switching to http, so that should be much better soon. Load from the frontend and Rust backend are both pretty low for now.
  
  I believe Dessalines or nutomic were saying on a Matrix room that Postgres was their worst performing component at the moment, and why they needed a vCPU upgrade on their server. Maybe some sort of managed off-site Postgres instance could be an option?

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements
How/which URL should we link to then? Now is the best time to get users to switch to Lemmy so we need to make it as newbie friendly as possible. Already the application process has put off some people (I do like that bit though, keeps away the low effort folks). Thanks.
- The one which is most relevant to the topic. So slrpnk.net if its an environmentalist subreddit, or feddit.it if its Italian. There are also a number of small general purpose instances around. I won't link anything here or else everyone would link to the same instance and it would also go down.
  
  But linking a specific instance is only shifting the problem away from lemmy.ml though, a large sub could still take that specific instance down.
  Isn't there some sort of directory or index which we can link to? I remember seeing it somewhere but not sure if it's "official" or if it can handle Reddit's hug of death.
- How/which URL should we link to then?
  My (somewhat) hot take is that large migrating subreddits should probably host their own communities, which is what we did when we told people on r/PrivacyGuides to move to Lemmy. Or at the very least, actually coordinate with instance admins beforehand about all of this, clearly lemmy.ml isn't the ideal choice for this situation.

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

I know it probably won't be fun for you hosting, but this makes me happy! Hopefully Lemmy will grow a lot!

Saldy it's very common to have this influx towards the "main server" as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.
Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.
- I don't think you can expect the bulk of reddit (not technical) user base to care or know what federation is.
  If people need to hunt out servers they will stay on something centralized until an alternative takes over.
  Hence why Mastedon is dead in the water.

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.

I guess it’s good news that a lot of people are migrating from other sites like me
- Yeah. Fuck Reddit and their stupid policies. I hope this will be a great alternative for Reddit communities

I run a general purpose, (currently) single-user instance as of yesterday. It will be funded through end of 2023 and then I'll probably beg for donations if I host other users. https://links.dartboard.social
This is hosted on Digital Ocean and I can scale up CPU/RAM/Storage/Bandwidth as needed. (I already did once)
- Single user instances are really great for the health of the network too.
  
  Agreed. How I've approached my akkoma instance (dartboard.social) - if someone else joins, great, I'll put in effort to make the instance a safe and accommodating space for them. If it's just me, then that's great too.
  
  That's interesting, why do you think so? Don't they just take the load of a single user?
  
  @dessalines @knova Not so great for trying to find people to follow though? Unless I'm missing something..?
- I'm curious about people starting up: Are you storing images on your own site with this instance?
  
  Yes, but I’m a single user instance currently so it wasn’t a concern for me. I also have like 20GB of storage so I have some time even if others join me.

I'm going to setup a Lemmy node. I'm not on lemmy.ml anyway, but I want this platform to r0ck!
I'll lean it up ASAP!

@ devs:
Can you please focus your work on optimising performance for the UI? It will greatly reduce the amount of electricity and money spent, so you're actually multiplying every tenth of a second you can shave off of CPU time...
Thank you a lot for writing this software. It's been a great little project so far and it seems to go down the Mastodon route of increased popularity. Be proud!
- We're about 80% done with a big rework of the UI to switch from websockets to http. This should solve most of the stability and performance issues of both the front and back end.
  
  Huh, I thought websockets are far more efficient that http.
  
  Damn I am veeery excited!! Do you have an ETA? No pressure though :)
  
  Great to hear, thank you for the update!
  
  lemmy devs are the best in the business hands down 💪

Beehaw has a concerning financial post at the top of their frontpage that may indicate they might struggle too when the massive wave of Reddit exodus occurs.
I guess I have to figure out what instances to suggest to people. I do find that direct instance suggestions is the way to go, so I guess I gotta write up a list.
Ideally, some pre-existing communities on Reddit would create their own instances similar to how often they have their own Discords, and have large amounts of users migrate that way. But there's a huge, wide, amount of technical difference between those two things. You can't exactly easily find capable Lemmy admins.

Crashing with 994 users online?
that's not a good look
- Well when you host your own website with your own funds, you try to not pay for unneeded perfs. But then a few hundreds people join, register, create content, upload images and videos, and suddenly your small VPS can't handle the load. And you're hesitant to scale up because it costs money, sometimes it costs time too because you need to migrate stuff, and maybe in a few days (or a few hours?) that load will disappear and now you're on a more expensive tier for nothing.
  
  Can attest: I have a small VPS (docean's lowest tier, in fact) and in the deep past I had occasions where a blog post was popular enough to throw it offline for a while. I wasn't about to lock myself into paying more money forever, to keep the site running for a day's peak traffic.
  In the case of lemmy.ml, this isn't helped by the frontend being Websockets-driven, which holds open a connection for every concurrent user; I hear Dessalines and crew are working on cutting that dependency out and dropping down to something more static, which should help with load.
- Yep Lemmy is over. We go back to Reddit now.
  
  Yup, pack it up boys. Was a good 2 days, but as lemmy.ml has the only functional server on the planet, we're done here (/s, obviously)
  
  Yep Lemmy is over. We go back to Reddit now.
  if your post history is anything to go by, maybe you should go back to Reddit lol. You brought the toxic side with you.
  
  Lemmy is federated. lemmy.ml is just a part of the Lemmy network, and just because lemmy.ml is struggling, doesn't mean other Lemmy instances will.

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