Wow that was fast.

Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the "worse" parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!

So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?

And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?

For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate... My friend gave me a great explanation:

• Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

• “Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

• When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

• If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community

• When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from

• Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately

• c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]

• Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.

Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit

I'm not sure how its being done as far as the technical aspects but Ruud has done a great job as admin upgrading the servers to keep up and anticipating the flow of new users.

The same admin also has experience with a mastadon.world server that experienced lots of growth from Twitter users leaving over musk moves. So essentially we have a good admin as far as I can tell and it's not his first rodeo. Part of the reason I chose this server

12k ??? That's crazy! It was only 500 when I joined 6 days ago, wow!

No worries for the downtime, when it's needed, it's needed :)

I’m glad to hear about the new users (I myself am one.) and the server upgrades!

I think lemmy.world suits me better than Beehaw. (great folks over there, no shade)

I like that lemmy.world let’s communities be openly created by users, as well as the inclusion of downvoting which I personally prefer.

Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there's a good way to predict load based on number of users.

Lemmy.world is fantastic, thanks for your efforts. It fit perfectly with all the criteria I had when choosing where to host my account.

That being said, I wish Lemmy.ml, the "main" Lemmy instance, more often registered communities created here. At the moment, most people just search for communities there and many of our own don't show up because no user from that instance interacted with our new and growing communities just yet - not only does this create a fragmentation issue, but given the massive load spike, Lemmy.ml is actually running a bit slow whereas Lemmy.world is handling posts better, making interaction easier specially when migrating users from Reddit or other places. For instance, my GameBoy community is ready, with users, and I'm about to post some good content - but as far as someone from Lemmy.ml is concerned, no such community exists.

Awesome to see so much growth. I just joined yesterday and I guess I'm not alone!

What's the operating cost? Thank you, for running this server! :)

I really appreciate what you're doing, but I'm worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to "just join a new instance 4head" and that just...doesn't have a good experience.

I'm not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn't seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?

King Ruud is good to us

do you plan to publish any of your scaling data? Some others might consider helping by running large instances and your learnings would be incredibly helpful.

Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!

Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.

Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn't work at all, hindering community discovery.

Thanks!

We are growing too powerful!

Thanks for hosting a great community!

Umm I joined at 2k users now there are over 15k. Damn this is exploding.