Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.
If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it’s really you. Would be cool. 😎
Yeah I think the fediverse biggest limitation in general to achieving most of its stated goals is the fact that accounts are bound tightly to an instance
You’re thinking about it the wrong way.
I’ve had to go through a major change in thinking and adjust my interpretation in major ways.
I follow nine other instances.
Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn’t dependent on one instance.
Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.
It’s just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It’s going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.
Also…there’s a non-zero chance it’s getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.
I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn’t like you can extort any money out of lemmy.
Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there’s been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they’re going after any site that doesn’t have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.
What’s DDOS?
DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.
Distributed denial of service.
That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.
Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.
But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.
There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.
I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.
Twitter did this recently lol
It’s like a group of people standing in line for the cashier and they each buy a single peanut with cash and have a question to the manager.
I like that picture, it makes it easier to understand for people who aren’t that much into computers.
And now you can use that picture to even extend it with: We’re currently enjoying our checkout at different registers, where there’s not peanut nutjobs at the register. I like it too.
Lemmy is still alpha software, thrust into the limelight by the fall of Reddit. It is still in its infancy. Reddit has had over 18 years to get it right. So it will take some time.
I didn’t think of it that way.
Lemmy.world is super big AND being attacked constantly. Smaller instances don’t have these issues and they are stable and fast. You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I’m on lemmy.today and it’s fast and stable. Come join us and you will see.
Basically use the fediverse the way it was meant to be used.
You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I had no idea, just tried and you are right. Do you know if everything works the same, like moderation?
Yeah it’s all federated. If you get banned from a community on Lemmy.world, you will not be able to access it from Lemmy.today for example (with your lemmy.today user account).
This is the really super cool part about the fediverse. People don’t realize… This is where the magic is.
If Lemmy.world is down, you still access posts and threads and make posts etc from lemmy.today… And it all syncs when Lemmy.world is up again.
Another mind blowing moment is when you realize you can read and post on Lemmy from Mastadon… So you can combine interacting with Mastadon and Lemmy in the same conversion.
Very nice, although I guess most communities in an instance are moderated by users from that same instance.
Your instance only has two communities and they’re both about Lemmy. Seems a bit boring to me. Sorry.
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This should be put in large letters on the join lemmy site so people can understand the point of the fediverse…
Yup. A month ago, I was consumed as hell about Lemmy. I thought I needed to create on account on each instance.
You think theyre all siloed off from each other or something? I’m literally the only user on my instance and there is 1 community with 0 posts yet here I am, on another instance.
Local communities are totally irrelevant when deciding which instance should host your account.
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I thought the point was to join communities. Am I wrong?
You can join any community on any instance from any other instance, as long as the admin hasn’t blocked it.
So I don’t get the problem then.
… exactly?
Someone pointed out an advantage of smaller instances and you were the one that said small instances have a problem (lack of communities), and I’m the one pointing out that your supposed problem does not, in fact, exist.
TL;DR small instance good
Okay.
Reread their last sentence.
What instance you use as your home instance is irrelevant unless it has been defederated from an unusual amount of instances. You likely don’t want to try and use lemmygrad as your home lol.
Otherwise, home instance is only going to determine your local feed. Which is pretty much the least used feed anywhere other than maybe beehaw. Discovery via all combined with searches lets you populate your subscribed feed, so those are the ones that you’ll use most.
Lemmy is federated by design. If you try and treat instances like some kind of dedicated site the way reddit was, you might as well not use it at all because you’ll be missing out on the benefits federation brings to the format.
Are you old enough to remember geocities? It had these circles where individual sites within geocities would link to each other. You would have your own site, but be linked to maybe hundreds of others. That’s closer to what lemmy is than the kind of reddit experience you’re probably used to.
Never heard of it.
Well, I am old as fuck.
Yeah it’s just getting started, and you can start new communities if you like. But no point starting ones that already exists on other instances.
The amount of local communities doesn’t matter much, Im subscribed to like 100 remote communities anyway. :)
But I thought multiplicity was the game.
I guess you need to do some more research on how Lemmy works.
You can follow any community from any instance. For now you could create an account at some lesser populated instances, I had one on lemmy.ml, made another account on monyet.cc. It’s a minor inconvenience that you have to subscribe to communities but other than that my experience with lemmy has been very good.
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I think there was a new version of lemmy released so the instance may be in the process of being updated.
I’ve started a 2nd account on another instance just for situations like that.
How do you keep communities aligned across the accounts?
I made a tool that can help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It allows you to synchronize subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings between accounts.
(though FYI different versions only gracefully handle a specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3 - see my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2094948 )
EDIT: Second link isn’t working - must be a Lemmy bug. But you can see it as a recent post on my profile.
Wow looks cool, will have to check it out soon!
specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3
What API-breaking changes did you find?
A super minor one, but there’s a new “infinite scrolling” boolean added to the user settings.
Thank you.
There’s no official way that I know of. I believe it’s in the backlog of desires features on both Lemmy and Kbin. I will say it may be longer until there’s a migration between the two platforms, but there are some unofficial migrations out there between two accounts utilizing the same platform (like one Lemmy instance to another or one kbin instance to another).
Isn’t that spamming though?
Not at all, it’s perfectly fine to have accounts on multiple instances.
Do you mean the same username or different usernames? I may be misunderstanding your point.
I’m not who you’re replying to, but I have accounts on a handful of instances for this very reason. Sometimes things go down or get laggy, and I just hop to a different instance.
It’s a strength of the fediverse.
That’s entirely up to you, it can be the same username if you want. Speaking as an instance admin, there is no problem with users creating multiple accounts across instances, even if they’re the same username.
Spam would be creating as many usernames as you can on any given instance (e.g. trying to register 100 users on lemmy.world because reasons) - there’s obviously a problem with that. Creating you@instance1, you@instance2 and you@instanceN is perfectly fine.
I thought that you had to have the same username to identify yourself.
That’s actually likely to cause some issues down the line with people impersonating other users, but for now It’s fine
There are no requirements, and they wouldn’t be enforceable even if somebody tried. The admin of instance1 has no way of knowing that you already have an account on instance2. Your identifiable details (IP address, e-mail address) are private to the instance that you sign up with and it would be a violation of privacy (and inherently scummy) for those to be shared between instances - they’re not.
You can be anonymous on the fediverse, just like the Internet in general used to be before Facebook.
I choose not to be. I like to have a clear breadcrumb trail for myself and not confuse people.
The only times when I have created a fake identity were out of spite or revenge against others which I no longer condone.
Not at all. You don’t have to identify as yourself on every instance you have an account. It’s literally a different account. You can keep a backup of all your subscriptions/follows/etc from one to the other or you can treat them as two entirely different identities. Just don’t have them generate a lot of pointless traffic between each other (like arguing with yourself on a post or something).
Wouldn’t it be easier to be the same person across all of the communities and instances rather than split your personality?
In the Fediverse it isn’t possible to reserve your username. I could host a server and get something like
favrion@lemmy.accountso it’s unreasonable to expect that users keep the same username across instances. Reddit is more anonymous than Facebook. The Fediverse is more anonymous than Reddit.But I do.
I have accounts on about 6 instances with the same username. I don’t see why that would be a problem.
Don’t use the same username (although you can if it’s available). But try to be a bit anonomous here.
I don’t know why I would want to not use my username though.
The Lemmy.world server runs on a 16mhz 386dx and has 16mb of ram. It just does that sometimes.
It temporarily goes down when the laptop gets moved to another Starbucks location.
It’s definitely bad if you can’t use a service you’d like to use but one has to remember that this isn’t run by someone with millions of dollars at their fingertips. And the reason for that is simple: This service doesn’t exploit it’s users.
Best bet is probably to create an account on Lemmy and another on Kbin. Not only is it simply not likely for two instances to go down, but they’re also different platforms, so further decreases the likelihood. And you can see all the same content.
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
They’re working on it.
That db migration must be massive for them given there’s an 80% expected size decrease.
Its on its infancy and remember this is not run by a big corporation its run by volunteers. If you dont like feel free to go back to reddit.
Edit: Hey guys so yeah this comment was too harsh against newcomers to the platform and I would like to apologize.
While you are correct, your tone is quite dismissive and unwelcoming. If it’s to be a replacement, it’s reliability is relevant. On most of the update posts ive seen, users are generally appreciative of the work done.
Lemmy.world isn’t meant to replace Reddit. The fediverse and various implementations of the ActivityPub protocol are. Lemmy and Kbin appear to be some of the frontrunners, but lemmy.world isn’t a lynchpin. Other Lemmy instances are up. And it’s a bit naive to expect mostly volunteer servers to have the same uptime as a well-founded corporation. And let’s remember, reddit used to go down a lot more early in its life compared to late in life (and it’d still go down then).
Plus, it’s still a bit entitled to expect uptime just because they have an intent to provide what they believe is a better service than reddit. It’s not only about folks ingesting content, but also those who create and moderate.
It’s reliability has been pretty good all things considered.
I don’t disagree, but discussing reliability and access shouldn’t be met with suggestions to leave the community.
It may be entitled to expect uptime for a volunteer service but it’s also entitled of the project as a whole to expect users if the service is not usable.
I’ve had good reliability. My home instance advises when updated are planned and are normally for minutes. The timeline is generally rough estimates, with the caveat that the admin is doing it outside their usual work hours. The users thank them for the update and take an interest.
But that’s not what the post indicated. You can’t ignore the tone of the post and the misconceptions it implies.
Yeah, if it’s a roll of the dice whether the platform will be accessible on any day, people will eventually go somewhere else.
But it’s the fediverse. I mean, you’re still using the platform as we speak.
Still better than dealing with reddit mods
You got me in the first half… But then
I know it was a strong comment but it just that some people want everything so easy to use and I understand that they are busy , have a job , family , etc. Thats why I suggested it to go back to reddit.
I’ve tried refreshing lemmy.world and Cloudflare blocked me:
I’m officially a bot now I guess.
Edit: But more on the topic, they have been plagued by DDoS attacks recently so my guess is it’s more of the same.
Edit edit:
I was actually scrolling through to see if anyone posted anything about the outage hahaha. Do they make announcement posts to warn about an outage for Lemmy version updates?
Apparently not. I had no warning.
At least we got other instances, so we can keep scrolling lol
Other comments seem to indicate it’s not a planned outage but just the server getting too many hits.
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
The closest you’ll get.
This might be of interest: https://lemmy-status.org/
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
A bit more specific to Lemmy world.
Lemmy.one is down too. That’s where all my subscriptions are :(
Same for lemmy.one the past few days. I set up a kbin account to keep going. :(
Maybe we should just sticky this post 😫
