1y ago

Lemmy resembles the old reddit experience so well that they even emulate the old reddit server performance

410 comments

The big user experience problem is everyone is getting funneled into Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml, and they can’t scare fast enough.
But Lemmy is federated. So signup for a smaller instance. You’ll still be able to subscribe and post to communities on other instances.
- Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.
  
  Use and recommend lemm.ee, lemmy.one, and vlemmy.net to others
  Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
  
  Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight.
  Next couple weeks should be interesting
  
  When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
  
  My instance (civilloquy.com) has open sign-ups. ;)
  
  I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
  
  When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
  
  try mine.
- I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
  Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.
  
  Are you avoiding all interaction with the communities on lemmy.world, also? I'm not clear if I should just avoid using this .world account, or if I should avoid all .world communities to prevent overloading.
- That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
  
  Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren't is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can't apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don't even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
  All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it's something admins set themselves) would be useful.
- Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.
  
  What's going on with beehaw? I'm a bit out of the loop.
- I only had luck making an account on my 3rd attempt, on sh.itjust.works
- I tried getting on both of those for a couple weeks. I could not get through on either. Found lemm.ee and have had zero issues.
- So signup for a smaller instance
  Unless you want to create a community on that instance. You can only create communities in the instance you sign up.
  
  ...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
  Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
- What does it mean to say that Lemmy is federated?
  
  Basically there are many different Lemmy servers. Http://lemmy.world Http://lemmy.ml Http://shit.just.works Etc etc
  It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
  Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.
- But why do I have separate profiles for each instance? Is it because I signed up in three instances? Is the only way to rectify this, to delete accounts?
  https://lemmy.one/u/unknown_name
  https://lemmy.world/u/unknown_name
  https://lemmy.ml/u/unknown_name
  
  Imagine if you registered an email address with gmail, hotmail, and iCloud. You’d have three separate inboxes.
  And like email, which is also federated, you don’t need a gmail address to message gmail people, or a hotmail address to message hotmail people. You can signup with one domain / instance, and subscribe to communities from another domain / instance.
- The problem is that it uses WebSockets in a completely braindead way. There is absolutely zero reason to waste server resources on that for every single user. Of course it fails to scale..
  
  Well you're in luck because Lemmy 0.18 rips out all WebSocket code.
- How does that work? Still confused.
  
  Basically, in the beehaw example, all of Lemmy.world’s messages to beehaw communities are kind of stuck in an old deprecated beehaw outbox that is not being checked by beehaw. Lemmy.world people can see all the messages sitting in their beehaw outbox, but beehaw ain’t coming to get their mail, and they’re no longer sending mail to Lemmy.world.
- What happens to the communities on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml if they’re no longer around? It seems like the most active communities are mostly on those two instances.
  
  A good example is what just happened with beehaw. Beehaw cut ties with lemmy.world temporarily until some new mod tools roll out.
  If you were subbed to a beehaw community from lemmy.world, you can still post to that community, but only LW people can see the post. You can use that capability to tell people to migrate away to a new home.
  Or, if an instance gets big and valuable, I’m sure their will people champing at the bit to take on the domain and instance if the OG admin wants out.
- The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.
- That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. they should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.

Still better than the official reddit app.
- Smoke signals would be better than the official app.
  
  I've considered switching to carrier pigeons
  
  Just not using the app is better than using the app.
- A surprisingly low bar
- So true.

I want to be mad but FFS Reddit had Conde Nast money for most of its shittery so they had NO excuse except incompetence.
At least Fediverse servers are typically Steve's old laptop or some shit so it's understandable.
- It's generally more like "Steve's 10 eur/mo cloud server in which they run ten other things next to Lemmy, which is written by two devs and barely held together by duct tape and prayers"
  But that doesn't change the overall point.
  
  it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
  
  Good point. Who the hell hosts their own server anymore?
  
  But I know where OC was coming from, 15-25 years ago it would have been the crap old laptop, the cardboard box server, the DEC PDP-11 the University is still powering for some reason.
  
  it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
- Reddit's database was pretty poorly designed. They designed it to be really flexible so they could make changes easily early on, but it was highly inefficient. I don't know if it's still like that, but the old website's source code is public and it is very inefficient.

Given the... frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and...
I mean it's getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.
- It really is a defining moment for Lemmy. If the devs can't adapt quickly enough to handle the traffic, I doubt many Reddifugees will stick around.
  
  Depends what timelines and what types of users were talking about, in my opinion. Users migrating who have contributed good content and/or moderation should have the patience to get through most of the growing pains. Casual users who show up just to browse and maybe up or downvote a few things don’t add a lot of value up front anyway, so the attrition of those users won’t matter too much in the long run. Those types of users will likely be back in the future once the kinks get worked out, or will be replaced by users of the same type. Patience is the game.
  
  I'm probably here to stay. Maybe not Lemmy specifically, but i've already joined Mastodon once and then bailed and things have only gotten worse since then. It's either this or Tumblr and my Tumblr account is still all jacked. Or maybe Cohost or Pillowfort will start drawing people in? I'd take one of those, too.
  But even if i have to run my own Lemmy instance i don't want to go back to some privately owned site that's just going to have the same cycle kill it again
  
  I'm already seeing vastly improved performance, so I think the worst of the lag from recent updates is behind us.

search actually works here.
already better than old reddit.
- That’s been a shocker, yeah.

It just feels so weird to have big threads with good fresh discussions going on hours after the post.
Not to say there isn't an occasional asshole here and there during this wave, but I don't think reddit has ever felt like this at any point.
- It's because sorting comments by "hot" prioritizes new comments more than old comments even taking into account votes. So a 3d old comment with 50 votes might appear below a 2h old comment with 5 votes. Unlike Reddit which just pushes the first comments to the top and anything new will drown in the sea of comments and never surface or be seen.
  
  That's my guess as well. And the post default sorting by "active" means the top posts usually have a lot more staying power compared to reddit.
  Didn't see much here that made me roll my eyes and think:"That made me feel dumber for reading it.", whereas on reddit that's pretty much every big thread.

Would upvote but I keep getting server-side errors
- That's interesting but have you considered that Value
  <html>
  of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject?

And here I am laughing on my speedy private instance. For real, the best part of Lemmy is if your experience is bad you can hop to a different instance and not miss a post
- Question about this, is it just a speedier general browsing on other instances as well? Or just your local posts?
  
  Everything is faster. For the most part, your local instance will download posts and comments for any community you (or anyone else on your instance) is subscribed to. So when you log in, you log into your server and browse the content locally (posts from everywhere) while your server in the background constantly is receiving updates through the ActivityPub protocol.
  I literally have no delay in using Lemmy in any way.

It's early days here. Give it some time...
- It's part of the charm :D
  
  Agreed! Lemmy kinda captures the same sense of excitement and experimentation that the early internet seemed to have.
- For real! Seems like everyone jumped ship and expects a flawless integration from Reddit. This tech is relatively new and provided by volunteers. Give it some time!
  
  Especially with the massive influx of users on this instance. I for one am quite happy with the admins and how they're holding up during this. lol

Does the Narwhal bacon again?

For those of you who, like me, are coming from Apollo you guys can try wefwef.app. It’s great
- It's a nice app, but I'm really wondering who came up with that name and why. That's not how you name something if you want it to be successful.
  
  Perhaps they're not trying to "be successful"?
  
  It's getting a name change.
- I know this night sound like a dumb comment, but it's kind of worth thinking about.
  Since it isn't an iOS app, they could probably make a version of it which isn't so iOS inspired, because frankly that layout is confusing to anyone who isn't used to it.
  I know Apple have a way of doing things, and they're like apps to look a certain way, but if you're not used to it it's not intuitive at all.
  
  But the point of wefwef is to feel familiar to those who used and are missing Apollo, the most popular iOS app.
  There has been a groundswell of Android apps starting up and not a great deal of activity in the iOS-specific space. So, wefwef is welcome for those looking for something that ticks that box.
  
  I just put a webpage link to my Lemmy homepage on my Home Screen. I haven't found the ability to comment or anything though, and I'm signed in.
  Edit- apparently I was signed out. 🤣
  
  Oh yeah, it's a bit all over the place, eh? Looks quite slick though, might give it a go!
- That looks great, thanks!
- Waiting for sync
- undefined> wefwef.app
  where do you get it?
  
  You pop wefwef.app in the browser which can then be installed as a PWA.
- I keep getting “cant load sever data” with this app. Is this just a lemmy thing or an app thing.
  
  In one of the posts a couple days ago the developer of wefef stated that the app is getting rate limited by lemmy.world servers because so many people are using it. I think they were trying to resolve it but I am still getting the same issue occasionally. It’s just growing pains of the whole ecosystem & totally expected and normal. I’m happy to be an early adopter of all this stuff and watching it grow and mature will be an exciting adventure!

To be fair, it worked well right before reddit cut off api access. This will probably happen everytime reddit does something stupid to drive away users. In other words, it could happen every two week based on how spez is lately.

If you’re bothered by performance, donate to the server to get better resources. Lemmy.world added more servers and load balancing, and there’s a patreon to donate $1 a month.
- When does that go into effect? Performance for me is still shit.
  
  This is the first weekend after the Reddit API was turned off. The influx of Reddit refugees hasn't stopped yet.

I forgive it. It has tremendous potential
- This is definitely going to be fun!

It's great to be here. All part of the fun of being apart of something new.
- I feel much as I did 12 years ago when I created my reddit account. I feel the winds of change in my bones.

Legit the first thing I noticed. It’s actually not that hard to find the community you’re looking for.
- Finding a hard time finding an active soccer community. The largest one only has a comment or two per post.
  I'm looking forward it growing though. r/soccer 2010-2014 was my favourite internet community ever.
  
  Yeah but if you comment then the commenting instantly goes up 33-50%!
  
  c/football is the major one for now but will grow over time as more features are available or widely known.
  
  I've been disappointed at how inactive the Rust communities I've seen are. r/rust was the main reason I visited Reddit.

Yeah but these guys aren't trying to make a profit from us and Reddit had venture capital money.

The instances are volunteer-ran and make no profit, give them some time to iron everything out
- Where do i donate?
  
  Look at the sidebar info on your instance, there should be links for donations.

Yeah, every time I try to upvote something, it'll take like 10-15 seconds to register
- I hear that it depends heavily on the instance you're on. Personally I'm thinking of making a programming.dev account and seeing how that works.

All the old Redditors jumped ship. Let's hope the new redditors and spam bots don't jump ship with them.
- Unfortunately, if there's any hope of lemmy really taking off, they'll come eventually. All popular sites and services have to deal with it at some point.
- I'd prefer the new redditors to the elitist ones, but well, what can I do.
  
  I'm afraid you're stuck with elitist pricks like me now :p
  
  Meow

Ngl. I am having fun.
- It is nice honestly. I appreciate all of you that have joined. This is going to be fun!

You gotta use lemmy.world for the OG experience 😂
- Are all of the lemmy servers different? I just signed up on lemmy.world
  
  Well, they are different server with different versions of lemmy running. But I think lemmy.world is running great again

Not sure if this is meant to be negative or positive but I for one like all the growing pains and issues. It makes the whole experience a little more engaging for me. I really like reading up on what problems are happening and how the teams are working towards solutions. I especially like the technical details that are just a little over my head because it’s fun to learn about!
- This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it's better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife's edge of creation, a new birth.
  
  Eh, if the issues mean a more focused audience remains part of the platform I’m down for that. I’d rather a smaller group of more dedicated people than an absolutely massive group of people where only the loudest voices are heard.
- If you move to a smaller instance, the issues will go away for you.
  
  ... And get replaced by a whole bunch of new ones!

The best part of this post, is the segue into the new !showerthoughts community

Laughs in lemm.ee
- yeah just made an account here, it's so much faster
- I'm dumb about this whole fediverse thing. Do I need to make an account on the lemm.ee instance to enjoy that sweet stability?
  Or can I just "swap to a new instance" and keep my incredibly tiny comment history?
  Using lemmy.world and constantly getting gateway errors.
  
  Wound up just making a lemm.ee account.
  Let's see if this is noticably more stable.
  
  You can't migrate accounts (yet?), so you can only make a new one at lemm.ee. Since lemm.ee is federated, you will be able to enjoy all of the sae content, regardless of ir being hosted on Lemmy world, ml or anywhere else...
  
  Yea lemmy world and timeouting a bit too many
- Vlemmy's also pretty nice. Only difficulty with it is that I somehow managed to glitch jerboa into being in a limbo state of being logged into both vlemmy and lemmy.world. But, I managed to get that fixed.

If you're on one of the bigger instances (lemmy.world for example) use https://lemmyverse.net/ to pick a smaller, less crowded instanceto call home.
I created an account on reddthat.com earlier today, and it's way less laggy than lemmy.world (my initial instance).
Hopefully in time lemmy gains functionality thatmakis account backup/porting easy so moving instances in nbd.
- Lemmy at least needs a feature like Mastodon to allow you to migrate your accounts to another instance.
- Or even simpler, a feature that lets you aggregate history, posts, comments and subscriptions from multiple instances in a transparent way.
  Sort of a meta-account / fedacount that tells all Lemmy instances that accounts a, b, c, and d are all the same user.
  
  Doesn’t that kind of go against the idea of federation? I don’t know if it’s worth compromising on.
- So to move instances you have to create a new account there, right?
  
  Yes -- I've got copies of my username on several different instances

I'm pretty new to this federation idea, but if I'm on a small instance of Lemmy and browsing c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world, would I still see degraded performance?
Are the instances mirroring the content of the communities hosted in another instance?
(Edit: thanks everyone, your responses are really helpful!)
- Yes, that's how federation works. Your local host may be faster than the instance you are browsing content on, especially if that other instance is getting hugged to death or DDOSed. But even if that is happening, the rest of the Fediverse works just fine.
  No, instances are not mirrored. That's probably possible in activitypub (the protocol that Lemmy and similar Fediverse platforms use), but unlikely to happen due to server resources and funding.
  Think of it as a bunch of forums on the Internet, where an account made on one forum allows you to comment and see content on other forums, but you don't need a separate account for all of them. Federation somewhat simplifies things, but there are drawbacks that I won't get into here.
- Not an expert: On site loading no, but on propagating data across the fediverse yes, which is much more subtle. On my instance performance is great!
- Comments/posts will federate much slower or even fail if theres alot of load on the other instances. Everything accessed from your instance is already federated and the content is located on your instance by that point, except for images
- There will just be less posts, comments, voting than usual

The top three instances a currently overcrowded. I recommend checking out a smaller instance (for example https://laguna.chat).
Smaller instances are still able to access to same content. But it is just a different server that processes the content.
- But are they ? I posted a comment a couple of days ago via lemmy.world on a 'remotely hosted' community, and then viewed the same post via its 'native' instance, and my comment never showed up, even days later.
  
  Lemmy.world is having some performance issues, so perhaps the comment just didn't get pushed out
  
  There are some issues regarding sync. If an instance is not reachable when an action is synced (e.g. due to overloaded servers), the sync is never attempted again and the instances will stay out of sync.

Well, if its too slow, you can just self-host it.
- I have to check this... As that would the best way to have control of the account without risking that the instance were I am suddenly dissapears although I guess I need to setup cloudfare or something on my domain to avoid direct attacks to my dedicated server I guess as the instance where I am would be public to other users.
  That and some domain provider with privacy protection which most have nowadays so my name and address isn't public directly on my domain info.
- How expensive would this be?
  
  Well, if you have an old laptop or computer laying around, its free. It should not be very resource intensive if you're only using it for yourself.
  But you do need a domain name if i remember correctly.

I love that your first instinct after being here just a few hours is to removed about things. Maybe donate and thank the devs for the free work they're doing so you don't have to deal with the bullshit on Reddit, and then in a month or so when the user influx has calmed down a bit, then you can removed if you want.
- Damn bro chill, they were making a joke
  
  No! Anger! Must be mad!
- i don't think this was intended as an entirely serious complaint.
  personally i'm very impressed with how well it's still running right now despite the influx
- Yeah on that note how do we help the instances so they can take more load is there like a way to donate or something?
- Did you think redditors will stop moaning just cause they are in a new place? removed is universal as long as three or more people can gather around on some corner of the internet.

It's slower than reddit ever was.... at least in the 14 years I was there.
- I joined a smaller instance that more fits my interests, but is still federated with the "popular" ones I like. So far it works great.
  
  I still haven’t got a clue what this means. Goddamn it.
- It's funny seeing famiar usernames, heh.
  It's speed largely depends on the instance you're connected to. There's definitely scaling problems going on with some instances.
- Since all the instances are independent, it's going to be very difficult to recreate completely the experience of a corporate behemoth. But it's that independence which also give this platform true freedom and potential longevity, so the tradeoffs seem worth it. It should also be said that the load overall has gone up a lot since reddit just shut off the 3rd party apps officially, so we should see better results moving forward as things equalize after the rush.

Try lemm.ee instance. It is REALLY fast compared to lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. And it is also general instance, not some theme-specific.
- To be fair, lemm.ee has an entire order of magnitude less monthly users than world. I think it's at the perfect size, actually.
  
  Wait i have only been using lemm.ee, are you saying ive been lemming with 1 nut sack stapled to my leg?

Yeah, this is taking me back to 2013 reddit. Really enjoying it here. I'm hoping it continues to walk down this path.
- Maybe some upvote tally, maybe some inconspicuous text-based ads...

My app erroring out halfway through reading the title

Gotta start somewhere...

I even got an error page the first time I tried to load this post. Just like old times! 🥲

That depends on the instance you’re on.

Even the user interface brings back the memory...

I would just wish there would be a new Reddit view as well. It is just so annoying having to click on the images to zoom in
- I prefer having to click on the image, but I keep wanting to resize it like with RES TT_TT
  
  I have tried to resize like in RES so many times. lol
- Gross
- What are you using? I'm using connect for lemmy there's an option for card views. Idk if that helps you or not.
- That's where apps come in. tons of great ones already. I like memmy on iOS so far.
  
  My phone runs on GNU/Linux (pinephone pro) so there are not many apps available. I have tried liftoff, but could not get it to compile.
- New reddit crops images that it displays, so you typically had to click on images anyways, though

Join a smaller instance. That is what I did and I’m having no performance issues now.

They even brought over the nobody replies to my comments part. Crazy!

I expected to see issues with just the offending instance even on another instance account, but hopped onto one of my smaller ones and found this post again much faster because it didn't take forever to load the page and again to load into the comments.
That's pretty dope!

It's just lemmy.world, because majority of people jumped on it.
https://files.catbox.moe/kfvn0u.png
Use different instances to get better experience (you can still subscribe to communities that aren't on your server)
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/tree/main

I’m worried about the search function. Every post ever made?

Is that why I need to click to subscribe 5 times having it time out every time?
- Yep. Try registering a new account on different instance that isn't as crowded, the issues will be much better.

This is all I want. Just text, nothing more. Just like reddit.compact version that they took away.

Bottom text 🤓

Like the good old times

I have been having alright time with my instance, on Lemmy World instances though I have noticed a big delay in posting, I think it might just be Lemmy.World getting hammered
- Perhaps the final Reddit hug of death?

i still get substribe in peding. it was one week ago.
- I've seen some people suggest unsubscribing and then resubscribing to resolve the delay. But that's never worked for me 🤷‍♂️

Anything to make you feel at home 🥰

410 comments