this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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You Should Know

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I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.

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[–] firipu 90 points 1 year ago (2 children)

All fine and dandy, but don't just pick a random one close to you. Don't forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago

Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don't mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info

What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don't even require an email address to sign up.

[–] nyakojiru 39 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Like if you are ginger or not

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Pfft - everyone knows you need a soul to get online

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren't ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn't say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.

My main concern would be instance longevity.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)

A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you're behind CG-NAT you don't get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don't think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.

My main concern would be instance longevity

This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am aware of how a public facing IP address works, and how little information it does give, by itself. It is still a privacy concern, and can be used in conjunction with other data to launch social engineering attacks or to help narrow down other data.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Close to you helps in general, it's not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

There are feature requests on the gethub for Lemmy to add the ability to move users and communities between instances. It comes up often enough it's just a question of how to implement it and when.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I second this request, I've created at least 5 accounts in different instances since I migrated.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!

I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it's easier to search. The instances also aren't 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yeah, Lemmy being in a very "alpha" state makes some of the things a user wants to do difficult.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community

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

How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

You can click the "use map" button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can't find a instance that you like that is close don't worry. Because server closeness doesn't matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.

[–] Mr_Buscemi 6 points 1 year ago

Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.

Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.

https://thelemmy.club

You'll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I'll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)

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[–] _MoveSwiftly 9 points 1 year ago

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.

Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I'm open to a few public users.

Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.

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[–] Im_old 9 points 1 year ago

So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)

[–] trefirefem 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too

Can you elaborate?

[–] sockenklaus 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can't moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.

They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can't find it at the moment.

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[–] proudblond 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have any advice on how to find one? Especially the “local to you” part?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes, I just made the switch to a closer instance yesterday. So much faster. I was on lemmy.world for the past few weeks but then I realized the server is hosted in Europe and I was getting 144ms ping from US east coast. This new instance I'm on, I'm getting 22ms ping.

You can test latency yourself from cmd by typing "ping lemmy.world" for example

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat

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[–] wqzwqz 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is moving instances a thing or would you need to sign up from scratch?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

AFAIK you need to sign up from scratch. But I'm pretty sure Lemmy devs will work on that. It's already a thing on Mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

There's a script already in development by an enthusiast https://sh.itjust.works/post/693061

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