this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

founded 4 years ago
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Is there a feature to send a read-only/static link to Lemmy pages?

I’m envisioning a pre-cached version of the page that is updated hourly or so, rather than querying the database live for every comment on the thread. In a perfect world, these could also be offloaded to a CDN as static pages…

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This is one of the biggest hurdles to get into Lemmy. I consider myself quite tech savvy but I am at a stage of my life that I cannot read hundreds of page of documentation just to use a forum.

There need to be a way to seamlessly move people from instance to another without them having to do it themselves or at the least a way way shorter documentation that goes to the point in one page.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (6 children)

I'm a noob. I created an account on beehaw and on lemmy.ml. That's because I see communities on one instance that I'm interested in and a different community on another instance. So if there's a technology community on both, how do I get to see all the technology posts without having to have two accounts?

This is really confusing for noobs like me. I'd just like to see one community to technology, one for Science, one for nintendo etc. I don't care it it's spread out amongst different servers to divvy up the load, but from the user side, it needs to be seamlessly integrated.

I'm still learning how all this works though. But I don't know how many folks that are more casual than me will be willing to figure it out. I hope they do though! It'll be worth it to leave reddit in the rearview mirror!

Edit: lawdy, I just figured it out. Local vs all on the communities list. It was right in front of my face. good grief!

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 years ago (8 children)

well, what can be done to help with upgrades to this server? what does that entail?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that's going to create performance problems.

We'll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Saldy it's very common to have this influx towards the "main server" as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.

Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I know I'm being a bit pushy at this point, but distributing instance load can be helped in some part by merging this PR and deploying the latest changes (including more languages and recommended instances as well) :)

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is there anyway to scale an instance by adding more nodes? Not be adding additional instances, but more of a distributed load balancing for a given instance? What about migrating communities to a different hardware instance? What scaling challenges does Lemmy face that something like Mastondon doesn't?

I'm sure there are many folks (myself included) who have technical resources that are not community builders. I'm sure if there if there is a way to spread the load, enough folks want this to succeed to make it work.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.

Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won't necessarily help with the load. What's needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that's not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL...)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

is it possible to move an existing profile to a new server, like on Mastodon? or I need to create a new one and "start over"?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Soo, stupid question maybe but how does federation work with your own instance?

I've set up a solo instance using ansible and subscribed to [email protected]. If I wanted my ALL page populated with posts from other lemmy.ml communities, would I have to subscribe to each individually? Or does my instance fetch lemmy.ml's Local eventually?

I've confirmed that federation is working using the method described in lemmy's docs and lemmy.ml (+ a few other instances) is listed under "Allowed instances" in my admin panel.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements

How/which URL should we link to then? Now is the best time to get users to switch to Lemmy so we need to make it as newbie friendly as possible. Already the application process has put off some people (I do like that bit though, keeps away the low effort folks). Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

The one which is most relevant to the topic. So slrpnk.net if its an environmentalist subreddit, or feddit.it if its Italian. There are also a number of small general purpose instances around. I won't link anything here or else everyone would link to the same instance and it would also go down.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.

Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.

Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative...

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I would be happy to use another instance but my account is on this one. Is there a way to migrate an account, or perhaps "link" accounts on multiple instances somehow?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

I'm going to setup a Lemmy node. I'm not on lemmy.ml anyway, but I want this platform to r0ck!

I'll lean it up ASAP!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago

I know it probably won't be fun for you hosting, but this makes me happy! Hopefully Lemmy will grow a lot!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Are there any published guidelines on the server requirements for an instance? I have my own instance running, seems to be working fine. But I'm reluctant to open it publically without an idea of if I'm setting myself up for failure or not.

Related, is there a way to entirely disable image uploads to my instance? I'm ok with it being a "reader" instance, but don't want to be hosting content directly.

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