Lemmy

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.

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...

Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @[email protected]

could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
If so, would you mind setting a "goalpost" for the community to help lift the financial burden?

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?

https://toast.ooo is accepting registrations 🎉

@[email protected] what kind of hosting do you guys use for lemmy.ml? At the time of writing it looks like you have around 33k users and around 2k active. What does that look like for resources consumed?

I've made https://lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/ to help take off some of that load. New registrations are welcomed and it should be maintained for a very very long time 🎂

I applied for a few other instances but this one came through first. Your downfall is being too good compared to the competition.

I'm going to set up a general purpose instance tomorrow with the intention of handling a relatively large number of users. The main problem is choosing a domain!

New user,how do I donate / tip to help you peeps cover server costs? It wasn't directly obvious how to do it; apologize if it's a big button right on a page that I missed.

is there some kind of status page to have a look at and see how things are going? I cannot make any comments to a specific community at the moment and wondering why.

EDIT: Figured it out, when I tried to leave a comment via Jerboa I got an error "Language not allowed" and so I selected a language on the desktop site and then my comment went through. Note that this error does not appear on desktop site so I had no idea what was going on and why my comment was not going through

lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.

Come join us at thebestinstance.com fam!

Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

• Owning user accounts
• Exclusively host communities
• Serving local and remote users webpages and media
• Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

Because servers "own" the user accounts and communities it's not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

I guess it's a bit too late for a redesign now... Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.

I use kbin too.

New to this feedverse or how you call it.

Why isn't there one login that can post on all platforms and I have to signup on each separately?

If there is, you're not making it obvious I guess.

Is there any way to help out with hardware when you are peaking ? I don't have the necessary knowledge about the fediverse, but I was thinking connecting my own server, or perhaps just open a 'help out' page where some webassembly/webrtc is taking some of your peak load ?

I wouldn't mind opening an extra 'worker' page or having a helper service on my server, when I feel the lemmy server is peaking.

something like lemmy-in.[tld] ?

For non technical users, the idea of instances can be a very confusing concept (the email analogy is a good one but its still confusing for people). I know you guys have a lot on your plate in terms of development wise, however I hope that prioritizing keeping lemmy.ml up is high up there. I say this because its the instance that most users from Reddit will flock to. And the last thing they need is to create an account then have the site go down for 6 hours. I havent experienced it going down. Although hopefully you have a backup site for when it does (what I mean is just a page that says your down/your working on fixing it... Try these instances instead.)

@[email protected] It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

Im a lemmy.ml user since 2021. I need to create a community 'goth-music-oriented' or need help to get /c/goth more visible (it doesn't appear in the lemmy community browsing.

The former community creator, Maya, i think she abandoned the community. Her last post was 2 years ago. Thank you in advance for any help.

Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.

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