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.
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.
Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.
I tried getting on both of those for a couple weeks. I could not get through on either. Found lemm.ee and have had zero issues.
So signup for a smaller instance
Unless you want to create a community on that instance. You can only create communities in the instance you sign up.
I only had luck making an account on my 3rd attempt, on sh.itjust.works
But why do I have separate profiles for each instance? Is it because I signed up in three instances? Is the only way to rectify this, to delete accounts?
The problem is that it uses WebSockets in a completely braindead way. There is absolutely zero reason to waste server resources on that for every single user. Of course it fails to scale…
What does it mean to say that Lemmy is federated?
How does that work? Still confused.
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What happens to the communities on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml if they’re no longer around? It seems like the most active communities are mostly on those two instances.
The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.
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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.
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Still better than the official reddit app.
Smoke signals would be better than the official app.
I’ve considered switching to carrier pigeons
Do I have the proposal for you! RFC2549
All you need are two tin cans joined by string.
I know some pensioners in my neighbourhood that’d love to talk to you about that.
A message in a bottle is easier to use. Also, the maintenance cost is negligible, since the system is powered by renewable wave energy. The only downside is the lag, which can vary from a few days to several centuries.
Just not using the app is better than using the app.
I can’t fathom how they bought a good app, put a dev “team” on it for 7 years, and still don’t have half the features some neckbeards in their mom’s basements without access to the backeng still managed to put into their apps.
What a pack of incompetent fucks.
Sounds like they lucked out into an awesome job with no real work required.
A surprisingly low bar
So true.
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”)
Do you have any specific resources or suggestions? I’m a software dev with lots of DigitalOcean experience looking to host my own instance. Also, can you log in to wefwef through your instance, or how do you access everything, specifically on mobile?
Depending on how well you know your way around, my recommendation is to not use the Ansible setup but instead treat it as documentation while doing things your way. It has quite a bit of strange stuff going on (postfix? two nginx installs with only one being in a container?) and seems to be missing important things such as SSH hardening. It also assumes it’ll be the only thing running in your server just in general (horrible yet common practice, unfortunately) so if you have anything set up it may or may not clobber over it to do things it’s own way, and end up breaking something.
Also, can you log in to wefwef through your instance, or how do you access everything, specifically on mobile?
I haven’t tried wefwef in particular but all native apps I tried work just fine. An issue I can see cropping up from wefwef is that Lemmy’s CORS policies are way too restrictive by default. No idea if they do any kind of proxying to get around that but that would be the main issue I’d imagine.
What’s the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.
The installation itself is pretty simple, every piece of lemmy lives in a docker container, so they should work right out of the box. The admin configuration has a slightly unintuitive UI but alas very few things to do, so really small leaning curve.
There are many guides on getting started with Linux servers as a whole. I recommend installing Debian Bookworm on a virtual machine or a spare laptop at first and going through the writeups all major cloud providers have, just to get a feel for using the terminal & initial setup (SSH hardening and reverse proxy configuration and so on)
After getting an initial feel for Linux admining, start reading up on Docker, Docker Compose, and containers in general. Avoid Podman until you’re experienced with Docker as it’s just different enough to trip you up. You can also check out LXC/LXD although it’s way less popular.
Oh, and speaking of Docker: UFW AND DOCKER WILL NOT WORK TOGETHER! DOCKER BYPASSES UFW (just making sure you don’t learn this until it’s too late)
Be careful of guides that are old (even a year makes a difference) or for different “distros” than the one you have. An exception for the second case is the Arch Linux wiki, which is one of the best resources just in general, aside from a few Arch specific bits like the exact package names to install. You should also use Arch’s “man pages” reference, as they’re built from the latest versions of packages compared to other man page renderers that are frequently outdated (like die.net)
Lemmy itself is harder to get right because the instructions so far are intended for people who kinda know what they’re doing, but once you have the base Linux admin knowledge, it won’t be that hard to pick up the parts necessary to get working with something like Lemmy.
Only one way to find out ;)
On a more serious note… I’m not sure if much has changed since then (probably, things have been moving fast…), but lemmy.world was hosted on about a $150 / mo server:
https://blog.mastodon.world/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax (it’s the most expensive option here)
That’s pretty beefy. You could probably get away with much less for a smaller instance.
But…but…spez said it will cause 200k per month!
That’s because he wants all 55 million active users accessing his servers so he shove ads down their throats.
To be fair, Reddit is a lot bigger than any Lemmy instance, and Lemmy instances have the benefit of being decentralised, so the load is on many different servers owned by different people as opposed to one group of servers owned by one company.
Sounds like a challenge
Good point. Who the hell hosts their own server anymore?
I have never seen this version before, this is fantastic.
Honestly, it’s negligent if a major company does host their own servers at this point. Big cloud server companies specialize in that and can do it better than others, with better guarantees of stability and maintenance. Pretty much the reason people specialize in everything else.
What you’re saying here is literally a punchline in infosec because of how many breaches are down to incompetent cloud service providers, because said cloud service providers take security about as seriously as the aforementioned c-suite does.
*EDIT No, the c-suite thing doesn’t make sense. Shut up. I recast this post and removed a bit. I don’t need your approval. I DRIVE A DODGE STRATUS
Lol what? Every server has down time. But the big cloud companies have actual liability for theirs
You are entirely ignorant of how anything works. There’s no “liability” unless they seriously fuck a goat. Downtime is expected and, in fact, built into contracts. X amount of downtime for service, Y amount for unforeseen circumstances, Z amount for shiggles. There may be some prorating built into it, but even that will be after a certain amount of downtime.
No matter how you slice it the only reason anyone uses cloud services is to cut costs. There actual facts simply do not pan out when you’re talking about security.
No matter how you slice it the only reason anyone uses cloud services is to cut costs.
Businesses chose cloud providers because they think that it will cut costs.
Those contracts are exactly what I mean. A certain, small amount of downtime is allowed for, and it’s expected to be fixed shortly. If either of those things aren’t true, then the business is in breach of that agreement.
Anyway no u r ignorant. Peace out
You will pay, sweetly, for that added uptime, however.
But I know where OC was coming from, 15-25 years ago it would have been the crap old laptop, the cardboard box server, the DEC PDP-11 the University is still powering for some reason.
… the PDP-11 😂
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?
About tree fiddy
Reddit’s database was pretty poorly designed. They designed it to be really flexible so they could make changes easily early on, but it was highly inefficient. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but the old website’s source code is public and it is very inefficient.
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.
search actually works here.
already better than old reddit.
That’s been a shocker, yeah.
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.
That’s my guess as well. And the post default sorting by “active” means the top posts usually have a lot more staying power compared to reddit.
Didn’t see much here that made me roll my eyes and think:“That made me feel dumber for reading it.”, whereas on reddit that’s pretty much every big thread.
That staying power is a blessing and a curse. Sometimes you’re looking for fresh content. Top Hour is marvelous. So is New Comments. :)
I think it encourages you to seek out other interesting communities when you want to see something different.
Yes, and I like it this way too. It definitely gives people who came into the thread late a voice.
Would upvote but I keep getting server-side errors
That’s interesting but have you considered that Value <html> of type java.lang.String cannot be converted to JSONObject?
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Looks like the app wasn’t developed with a scalable architecture from the start, then they strapped some caching out of desperation when users started flocking, and didn’t consider the invalidation parameters for private pages correctly.
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It’s a little bit baffling. It’s not like they couldn’t have predicted this server load. I know it’s tricky to foresee bottlenecks in some situations but them adding caching (a very basic thing for scalability) at the last minute belies a lack of either experience, forethought, or knowledge, I am not sure which.
I wonder if anyone has been me
I have been you, SwallowsDick
Holy shit! It there a never tell me the odds community here? This fits like a glove
Did you report this (on GitHub possibly)? That seems to be a fairly important bug for the devs to get their head around.
Here’s Johnny!
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
Question about this, is it just a speedier general browsing on other instances as well? Or just your local posts?
Everything is faster. For the most part, your local instance will download posts and comments for any community you (or anyone else on your instance) is subscribed to. So when you log in, you log into your server and browse the content locally (posts from everywhere) while your server in the background constantly is receiving updates through the ActivityPub protocol.
I literally have no delay in using Lemmy in any way.
What about the “all” stream? Is that also preloaded to the server?
The “all” stream would be all of the posts from the combined subs of the users on the instance. So if there’s a community nobody is subscribed to, it won’t appear on all. This is true of all instances. Many smaller ones will employ bots to crawl Lemmy and sub to communities to give the large instance “all” feeling.
That being said, yeah it’s all preloaded onto your local server. There is no difference in speed. Doesn’t matter if it’s active/subed or new/all they all load the same
I’d highly encourage everyone to find smaller instances and leave lemmy.world for the immediate expats. Find something that aligns with your values. Or if you are technically literate enough host your own instance. If you have an old desktop computer you’ve already got everything you need.
I should probably build an instance on my little home server. Is there a guide for that somewhere?
Right on the lemmy website. 🙂
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html
It can apparently take up a decent amount of space depending on how many communities you subscribe to.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible
There you go, enjoy
How many communities you subscribed and after two weeks how much data does it represents on your storage ?
Not OP but I can answer with my own stats:
In just a week, With BTRFS compression (compress-force=zstd:3) & deduplication (via bees), media is at about 1GB (and I am subscribed to media-heavy communities like 196) and the postgres DB is at about 550MB (which is also currently shared with Matrix Dendrite)
At “idle” (as you can be while being connected to ActivityPub & Matrix), the immediate CPU and RAM usage breakdown per container is:
NAME CPU % MEM USAGE / LIMIT MEM % NET IO BLOCK IO PIDS CPU TIME AVG CPU % pict-rs 0.20% 18.92MB / 4.005GB 0.47% 3.319GB / 1.105GB 17.58GB / 3.239GB 13 1h16m57.232828s 0.59% crowdsec 1.39% 44.23MB / 4.005GB 1.10% 106.4MB / 23.46MB 25.53GB / 486.7MB 11 45m28.744419s 1.95% caddy 0.63% 73.06MB / 4.005GB 1.82% 1.675GB / 1.977GB 3.322GB / 720MB 10 21m9.94572s 0.90% dendrite 1.58% 197.7MB / 4.005GB 4.94% 912.8MB / 2.33GB 8.718GB / 4.761GB 12 53m26.302022s 1.43% postgres 5.33% 82.51MB / 4.005GB 2.06% 56.22GB / 7.961GB 20.92GB / 295.7GB 23 8h20m28.078567s 2.86% lemmy-ui 0.00% 48.71MB / 4.005GB 1.22% 3.491GB / 5.961GB 3.603GB / 5.267GB 12 31m35.884936s 0.24% lemmy-be 2.82% 29.01MB / 4.005GB 0.72% 16.45GB / 57.85GB 7.966GB / 6.439GB 6 3h6m34.633508s 1.42%Net IO you shouldn’t really care about as that includes inter-container networking. I’m trying to find how much outgoing data have been transferred but because the month just ended I have no idea how accurate the numbers are.
On my instance we’ve got about 100 communities subscribed to. Started it first week of June, since then the instance is up to a little over 4 GB of disk space. YMMV depending on instance size.
I do that on my own instance too :D, private and small instances are really the way to go!
It’s early days here. Give it some time…
It’s part of the charm :D
Agreed! Lemmy kinda captures the same sense of excitement and experimentation that the early internet seemed to have.
For real! Seems like everyone jumped ship and expects a flawless integration from Reddit. This tech is relatively new and provided by volunteers. Give it some time!
Especially with the massive influx of users on this instance. I for one am quite happy with the admins and how they’re holding up during this. lol
Does the Narwhal bacon again?
Oh god
Only at midnight.
cries
Nope. I’m trying to hold my poop for three days
You are my first upvote and this is my first comment
Hopefully this turns into something
Not anymore…
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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
It’s a nice app, but I’m really wondering who came up with that name and why. That’s not how you name something if you want it to be successful.
Perhaps they’re not trying to “be successful”?
It’s getting a name change.
I would hope so lol
I know this night sound like a dumb comment, but it’s kind of worth thinking about.
Since it isn’t an iOS app, they could probably make a version of it which isn’t so iOS inspired, because frankly that layout is confusing to anyone who isn’t used to it.
I know Apple have a way of doing things, and they’re like apps to look a certain way, but if you’re not used to it it’s not intuitive at all.
But the point of wefwef is to feel familiar to those who used and are missing Apollo, the most popular iOS app.
There has been a groundswell of Android apps starting up and not a great deal of activity in the iOS-specific space. So, wefwef is welcome for those looking for something that ticks that box.
I just put a webpage link to my Lemmy homepage on my Home Screen. I haven’t found the ability to comment or anything though, and I’m signed in.
Edit- apparently I was signed out. 🤣
Oh yeah, it’s a bit all over the place, eh? Looks quite slick though, might give it a go!
Waiting for sync
That looks great, thanks!
undefined> wefwef.app
where do you get it?
You pop wefwef.app in the browser which can then be installed as a PWA.
You can also install any Lemmy instance as a PWA as well if you want.
I keep getting “cant load sever data” with this app. Is this just a lemmy thing or an app thing.
In one of the posts a couple days ago the developer of wefef stated that the app is getting rate limited by lemmy.world servers because so many people are using it. I think they were trying to resolve it but I am still getting the same issue occasionally. It’s just growing pains of the whole ecosystem & totally expected and normal. I’m happy to be an early adopter of all this stuff and watching it grow and mature will be an exciting adventure!
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.
It’s great to be here. All part of the fun of being apart of something new.
I feel much as I did 12 years ago when I created my reddit account. I feel the winds of change in my bones.
