The big user experience problem is everyone is getting funneled into Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml, and they can’t scare fast enough.
But Lemmy is federated. So signup for a smaller instance. You’ll still be able to subscribe and post to communities on other instances.
Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.
Use and recommend lemm.ee, lemmy.one, and vlemmy.net to others
Seriously, stop recommending large servers when lemmy hasn't been optimized for that yet. The point of decentralization is spreading out and still being connected; let's not waste that advantage.
I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I'm really glad to be here.
That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
Still better than the official reddit app.
A surprisingly low bar
I want to be mad but FFS Reddit had Conde Nast money for most of its shittery so they had NO excuse except incompetence.
At least Fediverse servers are typically Steve's old laptop or some shit so it's understandable.
It's generally more like "Steve's 10 eur/mo cloud server in which they run ten other things next to Lemmy, which is written by two devs and barely held together by duct tape and prayers"
But that doesn't change the overall point.
it's that cheap? If I spun up an instance and paid less than $150 how many users would I be able to have before it implodes?
The instance I'm replying from is a 5 eur/mo box from Hetzner.
Your main concerns are gonna be active user count & storage space. Especially if you decide to allow image or god forbid video uploads. Having a bunch of inactive users aren't going to affect costs that much as long as they don't have, like, a milion subscriptions. (If they're all subscribed to the same community things will "deduplicate")
Given the... frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and...
I mean it's getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.
It just feels so weird to have big threads with good fresh discussions going on hours after the post.
Not to say there isn't an occasional asshole here and there during this wave, but I don't think reddit has ever felt like this at any point.
It's because sorting comments by "hot" prioritizes new comments more than old comments even taking into account votes. So a 3d old comment with 50 votes might appear below a 2h old comment with 5 votes. Unlike Reddit which just pushes the first comments to the top and anything new will drown in the sea of comments and never surface or be seen.
And here I am laughing on my speedy private instance. For real, the best part of Lemmy is if your experience is bad you can hop to a different instance and not miss a post
If you’re bothered by performance, donate to the server to get better resources. Lemmy.world added more servers and load balancing, and there’s a patreon to donate $1 a month.
See the sidebar on the frontpage:
Legit the first thing I noticed. It’s actually not that hard to find the community you’re looking for.
To be fair, it worked well right before reddit cut off api access. This will probably happen everytime reddit does something stupid to drive away users. In other words, it could happen every two week based on how spez is lately.
For those of you who, like me, are coming from Apollo you guys can try wefwef.app. It’s great
Yeah, every time I try to upvote something, it'll take like 10-15 seconds to register
It's great to be here. All part of the fun of being apart of something new.
Yeah but these guys aren't trying to make a profit from us and Reddit had venture capital money.
The instances are volunteer-ran and make no profit, give them some time to iron everything out
All the old Redditors jumped ship. Let's hope the new redditors and spam bots don't jump ship with them.
Not sure if this is meant to be negative or positive but I for one like all the growing pains and issues. It makes the whole experience a little more engaging for me. I really like reading up on what problems are happening and how the teams are working towards solutions. I especially like the technical details that are just a little over my head because it’s fun to learn about!
The best part of this post, is the segue into the new !showerthoughts community
I'm pretty new to this federation idea, but if I'm on a small instance of Lemmy and browsing c/[email protected], would I still see degraded performance?
Are the instances mirroring the content of the communities hosted in another instance?
(Edit: thanks everyone, your responses are really helpful!)
Yes, that's how federation works. Your local host may be faster than the instance you are browsing content on, especially if that other instance is getting hugged to death or DDOSed. But even if that is happening, the rest of the Fediverse works just fine.
No, instances are not mirrored. That's probably possible in activitypub (the protocol that Lemmy and similar Fediverse platforms use), but unlikely to happen due to server resources and funding.
Think of it as a bunch of forums on the Internet, where an account made on one forum allows you to comment and see content on other forums, but you don't need a separate account for all of them. Federation somewhat simplifies things, but there are drawbacks that I won't get into here.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.