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.
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
averageusers (i.e not multi account users.Multiple accounts needed for
maximum uptimeon 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 seethings, 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.
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 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.
But I understand that it's possible, since it's possible on Mastodon, right? IMO a smooth account migration process where you don't lose anything on the account even if the server randomly shuts down, and it's just another line in your account history solves a lot of the problems I see with Lemmy.
Even for registration, it would lower the criticality of instance choice so you have more solutions like using a buffer server that gives people X time to choose another server, randomizing or even just to lower the pressure of it.
Yes, it is possible, but was not a priority until now. The boom of users is basically just two days old, the devs have not gotten enough time to catch up yet hehe
Are you a Lemmy dev or just vocal here and on github?
I'm not a dev, no. But I've been here a while and like to help out :)
For sure for sure, can't be easy keeping up with the sudden influx as it is, let alone launching new features.
I'm no expert, but the dev commentary on that ticket suggests that it can be done but hasn't risen up their priority list... and yeah... Mastodon accomplishing this with ActivityPub which Lemmy also uses suggests it's possible. I agree it would be valuable, and opens up options when instances churn or get over/under populated.
That's me right now.
Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn't have communities I want.
You didn't need to switch. You could've followed the same communities on lemmy.ml straight from your Beehaw account. It's one of the benefits of federation.
That needs to be made more clear, in my opinion.
Also, how does a ban work in that case?
If you’re signed into an account on Instance A and subscribed to a community on Instance B, and the Instance B admins ban you… Couldn’t you just sign up for a new account on Instance B or Instance C and rejoin/participate in the Instance B community again?
Also, if the Instance A admins ban your Instance A account from their entire instance, couldn’t you just login to your Instance B account and join all of Instance A’s communities?
For instance, if LemmyGrad banned my LemmyGrad account for being a “lib”… couldn’t I just use my Beehaw or Lemmy.ml account to participate in the LemmyGrad communities? Would this force them to detect/ban me twice?
Seems like admins/mods of Lemmy instances and communities are going to have to be doing a multitude more work than the Reddit admins/mods.
And they’ll have to also be detectives, to suss-out whether or not a user is someone who has previously been banned from their community.
Once this gets going with bots and whatnot, the federated system seems to be a bit of a spaghetti nightmare.
I went for beehaw first too, couldn't get registration to respond but then saw they didn't offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.
Downvoting is just used as a disagree button, not for its original purpose of promoting discourse and hiding comments that don't add to the conversation.
Any comments that add to the conversation get upvotes. Any that don't, can be reported and removed. I prefer it that way.
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?
As @[email protected] says, create a distributed index of usernames, and do not allow the same username to be registered twice.
I'd also propose at the same time to create a Discord style username system to avoid potential clashes - if this system is going to become large (mainstream) then eventually available usernames will be hard to choose from.
But I’ve already signed up as GuyDudeman on every Lemmy instance! What happens to all those accounts? 🤪
They become the components of a giant Combining Mecha.
There can be a manual process for anything, but could be a major issue if lemmy receives a big influx of "redfugees" in the coming weeks.
Like I said, something like a distributed user index across instances could address this.
Then people would start name-squatting and you would end up with people having to resort to [email protected] just because someone on a totally different instance already registered [email protected]. The instance already signifies that it is a different user and it is rather the exception that someone intentionally tries to impersonate a user by copying the avatar etc.
How is that ultimately any different from how usernames work in a centralized system? If you have a username on reddit, that's your username no matter what the subreddit/community. I understand how lemmy is analogous to email, but I'm not sure it's the right model for a link aggregator and discussion system.
I guess what I'm saying is that decentralization may be better served if instances operated as an internal load balancing system rather than strictly separate servers. This would also help with an influx of new users, so you can just spin up a new instance and lemmy just flexes up without having to manually direct users to sign up on a specific server/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.