Fediverse

A reminder that this constant advice people blindly parrot to install and flock to smaller instance has now created something like 1000 new servers in 50 days that are poorly run and already going offline as quickly as they went online.

I am always advocating for any of the top 25 instances that are not Lemmy.world or Lemmy.ml

For the rest of your post, I don't know what that has to do with people aggreating on LW.

A reminder that this constant advice people blindly parrot to install and flock to smaller instance has now created something like 1000 new servers in 50 days that are poorly run and already going offline as quickly as they went online.

And this will always.. always be the biggest problem in the FOSS community.

"I dont like X, so I'm going to leave and make my own version of X"

So userbases get spread thin, manpower gets spread thin, developers get spread thin, and the user experiences degrades for everyone until it pushes them back to the bullshit websites and products.

I know you are salty about how you are getting treated over at GitHub, but you should look at it objectively, Blaze is clearly advocating that people join top instances that's not lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, not nobody instances that only have 1-2 users. They certainly aren't going offline as quickly as they come online.

Definitely!

I didn't track the timing too closely, but in the last few weeks there have been quite long disruption of service due to DDoS attacks on the largest instances.

I am personally quite tolerant towards Lemmy as a platform in its very infancy, but some other users might want to quit it due to this kind of annoyances, hence my comment about moving to a smaller instance.

the people and content is already there. It’s easier

What do you mean? You can access all of the content in the Threadiverse from whatever instance, modulo defederation, but Lemmy.world defederates quite a few instances too, so that's valid for both big and small instances. If you are talking about the "All" feed, which will indeed be empty if you are in a 10 people instances (communities need to be subscribed by an instance member for the instance to get the community content), then it's a valid issue, and that's why I suggest people to move to one of the 24 biggest instances that are not LW or Lemmy.ml

Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, reddthat.com, lemmy.one, your country instance (if it's big enough). I'm on sopuli since a while now, and I'm very happy with the experience. 680 monthly active users, so the All feed is pretty much identical to the one on Lemmy.world, except the vey niche community I either don't care about or would already know by myself.

The biggest issue I see with having everyone on LW is that at some point the costs will be too high for the admins. It's quite a big risk, and that why I'm advocating to use smaller instances.

As always, I have to ask: is there a second admin, what would happen to the instance if something happened to you tomorrow (which I really wish will not!)

The Vlemmy.net disaster is still fresh in people's mind

Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don't know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?

There's no need to answer these questions. I'm not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.

(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the "all" feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)

I think that's one of the issues that the rest of the instances are facing to appear as trustful as LW. LW admins have a long established reputation and experience managing Fediverse services, and provide very good transparency and a large team.

Other instances are usually nowhere close to that (some will be in the future I hope). The question I usually raise when someone start promoting their instance is "how many admins do you have?´What happens if you run under a bus tomorrow (hopefully you'll stay safe of course)? Is there a back up plan in place?"

I think there is a huge misconception many people have that a larger instance is more likely to stay around, but due to the nonlinear costs involved in hosting fediverse instances this is not true.

Basically there is a sweet-spot around a few thousand (~2500) members where costs are low enough for a single admin paying things out of their own pocket long term is possible, but also enough members willing to occasionally donate or contribute otherwise to cover costs.

LASIM author here, ironically on my own alt: Just an FYI that support for Lemmy 0.18.3 is not yet out, but keep an eye out for it soon (I have it working on a branch but I need to test it more before release).

This is the first breaking API change since it's creation, so here are the limitations:

• Old version (0.1.2) will only support API 0.18.1 and 0.18.2
• New version (0.2.0) will only support 0.18.3 (and above until there are more breaking API changes)
• Profiles downloaded with 0.1.2 (and below) will automatically be converted to work with 0.2.0.

So that all means:

• You can use the old LASIM to migrate between 0.18.2 Lemmy instances
• You can use the new LASIM to migrate between 0.18.3 Lemmy instances
• You can use the old LASIM to download from an 0.18.2 instance then use the new LASIM to upload to a 0.18.3 instance
• You cannot use the new LASIN to download from a 0.18.3 instance and then the old LASIM to upload to a 0.18.2 instance (unless you are comfortable doing some manual work editing the JSON file so "old LASIM" understands it).

This will be true of every release with breaking API changes.

EDIT: PR is out. Once it builds, I'll publish a new release! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/pull/21

EDIT 2: Release is published! https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim/releases/tag/v0.2.0

Probably some hiccup in upgrading to 18.3