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.
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.)
What? How is it solved exactly? If say lemmy.ml is down, what's the point of other servers existing, if most of the content and users are here? Like, I created a few new communities on lemmy.ml, which don't exist on say Beehaw because for some strange reason, the Beehaw admins don't allow users to create communities. So how is going to Beehaw help me, if lemmy.ml is unavailable? Okay, so you tell me I should go to a different server then. Maybe even make a new server. Done and done. But there's very few to zero users on that server, so those new communities and content created there might as well not exist. Also, even though Lemmy is federated, the homepage defaults to "local", so all the new users coming in may miss out on all the other federated communities, and, if I'm reading this correctly, the federation isn't even a fully automatic process, and some admins may even choose to put there server in a whitelist mode. All of it makes the whole "advantage" of federation, or at least Lemmy's version of it, seem kind of pointless.
It's like saying, "Hey, Gmail is down so you should just use Hotmail instead." Okay, so I can still send and receive emails, but I can't access any of my old emails for context, and none of my contacts can reach me using my Gmail address, and none of my filters, address book and other content is available so I may not even be able to reach out to my contacts and let them know what my new email is.
IMO the way the way the federation should've been designed is to use something like blockchain technology, so every instance basically has all the content and there's only one source of truth for user accounts and data (distributed ledger), or maybe even just implement the whole thing as a plain old high-availability cluster with load balancing.
Unless I'm missing something fundamental, I don't see how this decentralization is of any use if the content isn't there.
Because you want to rely on someone else's instance. The idiomatic solution would be for a community to host their own lemmy/activitypub instance and join the federation. Then the community has control over their own data. In every sense. If they want to delete something (for breaching law, protocol, or whatever), they are free to do so and don't have to ask anyone else.
Please no. I mean there is IPFS out there that somewhat works like that, but I don't really like that. First, the ever-growing amount of data means that every instance has to keep up with it. If they wouldn't replicate it, the deletion of a single instance would still eliminate the data, even if there were references in a block-chain.
Also: the ability to "forget" is important. Not everything needs to live on forever. That it currently does, can already be a big problem. Look how peoples lives got almost ruined because someone dug up tweets from 10 years ago that were stupid. Solving the issue of data ownership is IMO one of the bigger things we need to keep in mind when designing a better web. Federation with the ability to "just" bring your own instance along where you are the owner is one of these options.
This is how I am understanding it. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I'm going to use Reddit as an example, since we all understand that...
So the way I understand this is that backbone is now the whole of the internet instead of just reddit.com.
Each instance would be somewhat akin to a self-hosted subreddit. We can reach any sub from any other sub, since the backbone is now spread across the whole internet instead of just reddit.com.
These subs (instances) are also like old style BB forums in that there can be different categories (communities) hosted by that instance, but those are also still visible across other instances.
So basically people who are making communities here are making a sub in a sub (in Reddit terms).
Do I have that correct?
Mostly. I try to think of instance as not a subreddit but a loose collection of them, like a multireddit.
What is kind of nice, in my understanding, is that text content is replicated across federated instances when a user is using both. So if you're on beehaw and comment on lemmy.ml, both of these servers will have your comments. That's already providing slightly more redundancy than reddit.