lemmy instances be going down

I'm running a small instance, thelemmy.club

We even have built in Voyager/WefWef at app.thelemmy.club :P

I don't advertise is too often as I'm not trying to get huge, we have about 120 users and have been up a month. But we have plenty of resources to grow a little.

Mine is sorta like this, it's pretty quiet but then also happens to have the biggest Steam Deck community.

Tinfoil hat theory: OG Lemmyheads are attacking the big centralized communities and taking them down in order to force all the new users to spread amongst the smaller instances like we're supposed to, preventing inevitable corporate control of the ActivityPub platform

I doubt that's anywhere close to the truth but I choose to believe it, crusty old hackers pulling the plug on their children for our own good

Why can't we have community tags for grouping? Like have a "tag" you can subscribe to that encompasses all "meme" communities, or "politics", etc. Then if something goes down people can default to whatever. Maybe you could even make it so if you wanted to post you could post it into tag and the tag decides based off metrics which community to actually post it in? Idk, maybe I am dumb. But that seems cool.

For communities, I feel like a good solution would be to let mods link similar communities from different instances together, sorta like an automatic cross post.

Ideally every minor Instance could have one major community located there, that could serve as the central space for that particular community. That’s pretty impossible of course, but it paints the picture.

You could probably do that if you had a centralised coordinator who could assi... I'll see myself out.

I feel like we’re seeing the inherent flaws of the fediverse here in some aspects. A completely democratic spread or spread in general of communities doesn’t seem like it’s going to work. Real people and infrastructure are behind making sure instances with communities that serve large amounts of user requests stay up and operable. Infrastructure costs people and money, and people with right skills and fundraising skills are not evenly distributed.

If an instance touts itself to be a mega-instance, that’s one thing. Lemmy is still a confusing place to understand if I should create my own community or join one. Some communities and instances have a lot more % active users and moderators than others.

People are also lazy. Hosting your own instance is “easy” until you have a popular community, or handful of popular communities. Unless you treat it like a job, not a whole lot of people are interested in spending time figuring out fundraising and dev ops to ensure their community can deal with future user growth.

Money, talent, and physical infrastructure aren’t evenly and fairly available. So it makes it difficult to produce a federated universe that doesn’t reflect these things.

Can’t expect new users to go down the rabbit hole of trying to understand what instance they should make an account on. All instances will grow over time and we are seeing a lot of unevenness because of factors stated above. Instances will surely balance out as time goes on, so I think whoever is prematurely attacking large instances—whether they are doing so for fediverse axiom related issues or not—is making fundamental mistakes of fediverse theory.

Part of the problem is discoverability. If people don't use my instance, they rarely know we have independent communities like !todayilearned@civilloquy.com. Some, like !games@civilloquy.com are really shadowed by larger versions where some sort of multi community subscription could help a lot.

Like the anchor tenant of a shopping mall.

Or every major community should exist on at least 3 instances for redundancy.

Or re-architect more like Usenet/nntp where (I think) each node would have its own copy of everything.

Mastodon account also works as a backup since you can subscribe to communities and post comments from there.

Are there any reasons for/against using the same username across different instances?

Centralization is natural, even in the fediverse. A successful lemmy is going to look like tens of large instances, a few hundred medium instances, and a ton of tiny and irrelevant instances. Even if federation and discovery get more transparent it's still likely going to be mostly centralized.

There's only one person to blame for the sudden explosion of users of a new and undeveloped system. I see this all as a good thing to happen in the beginning, as it will help improve and solidify solutions now, rather than years later when things are more established. There will be shuffling and mirroring of communities, and tools made to help in that cause, and all of that will make the overall fediverse better.

The posted content is almost all backed up elsewhere, iirc. My understanding is that the risk is less having a huge amount of content being generated on specific servers than it is having a lot of users concentrated on those servers. Restoring data from backup or migrating communities (from a content perspective, as in, rehosting) is a lot easier than having people locked out, or, worse, losing accounts altogether.

aleluyah

hallelujah?

I keep seeing Vlemmy mentioned but I guess I missed the drama. Did the server admin unexpectedly shut the server down?

What happened to vlemmy?

From a user interaction POV, just have a couple of accounts. I started out on a small server, got a .world and kbin account, then got a beehaw account. If a server is down, I just switch instances.

From a community standpoint, it's terrible because the instance hosts the only live version of the communities. IMHO communities shouldn't be instance specific. Every (federated) instance should have a two-way aggregation of identically named communities. That has some (minor) drawbacks, but is much better for new users to understand and is much more resilient to individual instance failures and outages. (/rant.off)

Except when sh.itjust.works went down later too lol

https://lemmy.world/post/1604919

So basically you have the instance you are looking at. That instance has a list of communities (from any instance) that it knows about. A new community is added whenever somebody on that instance views or subscribes to that community for the first time.

When you go to ALL on that instance, it will show only posts from those communities (which are listed in the Communities/ALL tab). So larger instances (which know about more communities) will tend to have more stuff in ALL.

There is also the issue of defederating, where the instance decides to block other instances, and communities from those instances will not show up in ALL.

So ALL is a bit misleading since it doesn't show posts from all communities on the Lemmyverse, but only ones that the instance knows about and chooses to federate with. However, a lot of the large servers will probably be pretty similar content-wise (except for ones like Beehaw that defederated from other large instances for various reasons).

Short answer: yeah.

Long answer: Instances federate with each other by default. Sometimes an instance defederates from a particular other instance, usually for good reasons (and oftentimes you're not missing out on valuable stuff). Your instance hosts your account and stuff you post, but connects you to stuff hosted on other instances as well. If some instance goes down, noone can access stuff posted from that instance (like users, posts etc.)

It's the same reason there isn't a central email sign on. Different people control different servers. They're all just using the same protocol so they are interoperable. Just like your email, you have an address that points to your particular account on your particular provider. Name@host.tld. It's essentially the same thing as email, just a different form of interaction.

So that instance admins can maintain more control over who can use their instance. I think it might be a modding nightmare otherwise.

Honestly I think such a decentralized distributed type website should exist, but moderation would be very difficult and it'd be like some kind of dark web 4chan

This right here. The primary benefit of the matrix protocol would be that a community would keep on chugging as any particular instances go up and down. There would be no "home" instance that goes down and takes the community with it.

This choice is going to see some communities get really big, but then the "home" instance goes belly-up, or makes some, ahem "management decisions" that really hurt the community, and they are going to have to painfully jump ship again and again.

The downside would be higher resource demands for instance owners -but that's a problem that will get better over time, instead of worse.

It was back online a few hours ago. It was down in the morning hours US time.

Same here! Don't know what they're talking about.

Wait untill you find who made lemmy in the first place. But don't worry, there's this proud capitalist alternative called reddit.

People are allowed to support whatever political causes they wish, so long as they are willing to engage civilly and fairly with other people. This is how the modern world works, with dialogue and debate instead of censorship, cowardly avoidance and control.