When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it’ll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?
Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:
- Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
- Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
- I’m seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it’ll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me…)
- A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he’s a list of mobile apps you can use, here’s how to sign up on patreon… etc).
Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for “joining”) is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
The proverbial “call to arms” would be appropriate.
We’ve got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I’m not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that’s it).
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Setting up an instance isn’t too bad, but it involves so much technical know-how, that a significant push to people self hosting their own instances probably isn’t going to work out. If you know what a VPS is, know how to SSH, know how to get an HTTPS certificate, chances are you can read the docs and figure out how to get an instance running.
That’s not really the issue though, the main issue is having some form of cohesion of communities. Lemmy is federated, but it’s never going to take off if all these different communities continue to stay small and fragmented. And those larger communities need to handle all those extra posts and users, meaning their single server needs the resources to handle that demand. It’s the centralization problem all over again.
I run my own instance, and while it’s not hard to federate, it’s cumbersome (I have to add new communities… to the search bar? What? Why?)
I would have expected to be able to drop in the name of a Lemmy instance, fetch a list of the top communities, and add the ones I want. You can’t do this though, you have to add each individual “sublemmy” entirely by hand. It’s tedious, and it makes discoverability nearly impossible.
Until that problem is solved, and until the Lemmy project finds some better clever way to organize similar interests across different instances (technology@lemmy1.whatever and technology@lemmy2.whatever need some kind of way to merge), I don’t think it will be largely successful. We need a way of creating large, active communities, without so much friction between “what server is it on?” It needs to be seamless, so we can distribute the cost to operate across all our instances, so no single entity feels like they need to keep throwing money at their server provider.
The best way to support Lemmy is to start drafting those PRs to make it better and to get closer to that sort of system.
Mastodon during the twitter migration had a problem where folks were standing up instances, but new users were having trouble finding them, or overwhelmed with lots of “interest-based” instances. Most users don’t care about a “furry” specific instance, or an instance focused on San Francisco Donut enthusiasts. They just want an instance.
Another problem is as time went on, some of those instances shut down abruptly and wiped out accounts for folks. Having a few centralized and supported instances at first will help solve that problem as well.
I have the technical know how, given a “GettingStarted.md” file to read to stand up an instance, but I’d rather put my time/energy into supporting an existing one. Dealing with the horde of people currently joining and about to join will require some coordination.
Federation is a strength… but also a weakness. Lemmy is amazing but seems to have a potential - almost a default path - that’ll lead to proliferation of instances and fragmentation of communities, exactly as you’re flagging. This will hardly be in the best interest of broad adoption.
Whether merging of communities across multiple instances is possible on the back-end or not (I have no clue myself), it’ll likely boil down to how the front-end apps do it. A smart, usable UI could “cross the streams” to a degree. Though, I have no idea what that would mean for moderation and even posting.
On one hand, Lemmy basically is not ready for the influx. On the other, is anyone ever really ready when shit goes down? Right now is the purest opportunity this platform is going to get.
It’s great to see this issue being raised now. The future of the platform will be determined by how quickly we can move to address some of these things. While there’s almost no time to prepare, there’s no earlier moment than now!
Lemmy directory kind of addresses this issue. They federate every instance, so if you look at their federated communities, you have quite a good idea of the biggest communities across the Lemmyverse
There already is a lemmy PR proposing the community auto-merge idea, it’s here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1113 . It’s very unlikely it can be implemented by Monday, though.
Completely agree that community fragmentation and discovery are the two biggest problems. I don’t expect those problems to be fixed by Monday.
We’ll get some new members, but I doubt we’ll see non-technical people joining in droves. But it could provide a solid enough user-base to create enough content and activity to sustain the space while it continues to improve.
Personally, I think a really good client app could soften the blow of the existing discovery and fragmentation issues. I see a future where an app like Apollo merges identically-named communities in the UI and the end-user doesn’t need to care about which instance the post is on. But codebase improvements could help facilitate that, I expect.
i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances
Lemmy’s current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.
To the average, non-techy user pasting
!<community>@<instance_url>to getNo resultsdespite knowing that community exists is… Offputting. Lemmy should not be showingNo resultswhile waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to<instance_url>/c/<community>would reveal it exists, and prevent this terribleNo resultsresponse entirely.Yeah totally, the federated features and especially the search could be streamlined quite a bit. I think this should be a top priority currently (to avoid centralization of the instances).
This is the main problem the fediverse experiences across the board. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to require a basic level of comprehension to sign up though. Inconvenient, sure, but if this is just the nature of the thing, it’s still better than being owned by venture capital.
i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances
For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.
Both us lemmy devs agree with you, we want a distributed network, not a single centralized service, that could potentially suffer all the same problems as reddit.
Plus its just more work for all us server admins.
I agree - decentralized is the future. Fwiw, I’m really enjoying lemmy and want it to succeed. I’m just hoping to help somehow. I’d love for centralized social networks to become decentralized so that the perverse incentives that exist currently can evaporate.
I’m nervous posting this because I don’t want to come off as telling you “what to do”. This is coming more from a desire to support the awesome work you’re doing to help lemmy grow on the fediverse. If this is too “forward” - I’m happy to back down and continue posting everything I’ve got to /c/earthporn, /c/photography, and /c/jeep. ;)
It seems in the short term, we’re just trying to capture and retain users so that communities can grow and become new homes for reddit refugees.
- If the signup process is difficult or confusing, the “capture” part of that goal will be diminished.
- Small instances have kind of a “ghost town” feel. I understand why this is, but new users don’t and this affects the “retention” part.
Some ideas:
- A getting started guide – for example, creating an account on a new/small instance is different than a large instance because of how federation works. The information in the fediverse is largely available, but knowing how to find it is nuanced. Having a guide or video or something could help with this and support the “retention” goal.
- Having a few preferred instances to handle the surge of new users. This will take efforts from server admins (like yourself) to communicate to the community the needs they have so that we can provide support. This addresses both “capture” and “retain” goals really well in the short term. Some sort of strategy would be needed long term to “decentralize”.
- I’m donating on patreon to lemmy.ml (just $10/month for now), but I wonder if other users realize that money is needed to handle the new load (for lemmy.ml, beehaw, etc). It seems reasonable to support the people that are crucial to making instances like this work without requiring them to take on enormous financial risk. (I’m saying this without understanding anything about your hosting solution or backend infrastructure, but assume that to scale, you need to pay Amazon/Microsoft/Google mo money).
- If you need help building out infrastructure, there are those of us here that would be willing to take some time to help as well - we just need a way to know what you need.
- Some kind of “invite” feature - it would let me send “invite” codes to my friends. This eliminates the “what instance should I use” question and potentially the “manual approval” process. This could potentially be used to create nefarious bot accounts, and may just need to exist initially (but not long term).
I decided to start up an instance for our subreddit and it’s been working out really well so far. It was probably about 8 hours of work to get everything together, get our daily posts to go up, etc. A few bugs to work out but overall people are pretty happy with it.
This worked well for us because our sub is a tight knit community. Other tight knit communities might consider something similar, and then just federating with the larger instances.
That’s amazing. I hope some Reddit mods consider this
The mistake is gathering at the bigger instances instead of picking smaller ones.
People just tend to gravitate to the biggest instances. Whatever is at the top of join-lemmy will probably be the ones hit the hardest.
Join-lemmy should probably change from number of users to load of the server. People would prefer to go for healthy servers
Or local ones. I specifically looked for a Canadian one as they tend to not be super huge.
Long term, I agree – the whole point of the fediverse is to distribute the user base, moderation capacity, etc. Initially though, we’re just trying to make it as easy as possible to for folks to discover lemmy and use it.
Sending them on a wild goose chase to find an instance and sign up complicates that. Getting them to come back the next day is also way harder when that experience sucks.
I actually don’t think there will be a big change.
Could be wrong but I think it will continue to be a drip of users coming in, not a big explosion on one day.
The context I’m using to predict the “big change” is the way the twitter/mastodon migration happened. Musk would do something, and literally within the same hour, thousands of new accounts would be created on mastodon and all those new users were flexing the various features in the platform to find accounts to follow and post content. With that history, I feel like “a drip” of users is unlikely - it’ll be more like waves from multiple tsunamis.
If things play out the way I’m expecting they will, we really will need instance owners to stand up, ask for the help they need and coordinate those efforts. Otherwise, users like me will just post meandering comments like this one, wondering what we can do to help.
Point users towards https://join-lemmy.org/instances
A pinned post like “Welcome to Lemmy!” on Lemmy.ml and other instances with that link would help I think. Also, I think it would be a more streamlined experience (and less disorienting) if the “Join” links on that page went directly to the instance’s signup page instead of the local instance feed.
I am a sysadmin by trade and run a bunch of stuff at home already. I’ve spun up a small cloud instance at lemmy.cafe to check it out and so far - so good. I’m absolutely up for expanding the resource capacity to a point, but ideally would prefer to not be the only one footing the bill.
This reply is in response to
If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.
I know from some previous experience that it’s really difficult to attract any donations, especially on a new (to absolute majority or new users) product AND not the main instance.
Thank you for setting this up
Yeah - its tricky. What I’m seeing though is instead of communicating that need at all, lemmy.ml and potentially other instance owners are just trying to push new users to smaller instances.
I am running my own mastodon instance in my basement - I’ve got other personal projects running in AWS, and work professionally in Azure. It sounds like you’ve got some great cloud experience as well. There seem to be lots of other similarly skilled folks here that can assist with deployment and scale automation (if that’s what they need), or others that could assist by just signing up for $5/month on patreon to cover server costs. That call to action needs to happen though or else people wont do anything.
Do we draft an intro doc right now?
I’m super new to this and still trying to learn stuff. Looks like folks can pin posts to the instance. Something like a “New to Lemmy? Start Here.” kind of post would be helpful. Right now, I just saw the “lemmy.ml is overloaded, use other instances instead” and wondered if I was in the wrong place.
yeah that post is probably the wrong post to have pinned because it’s definitely a weird welcome message
On the other hand, it could lead to a bit of FOMO — “wow, Lemmy is so popular it can’t handle the traffic” isn’t the worst problem to have.
I agree – the FOMO thing is real.
However having a clear path to follow would really help capture/retain those users. In other words “Wow, Lemmy is so popular it can’t handle the traffic – here’s an up-to-date list of instances to try anyway”, or some other option.
Possibly a pinned post where instance owners can comment info on their own instances without having to wait for someone to update a master list?
Yeah, that’s a good idea. Ideally it would be curated to only include unrestricted registrations — “write a letter describing why you want to join” is an immediate turn-off for a lot of people.
true but then being told to move to a different “instance” like beehaw is going to have people scratching their heads
Is it just me, or the sign in option on lemmy.one doesn’t work correctly? Nothing happens when I try to sign in.
Hard to say – so far on lemmy.ml, when the backend is overload, I can get pages to load (presumably from cache) but actions I take to change things (sign in, post comments or content, etc) result in an eternal “spinny wheel”.
Yup not an ideal situation to spur on planning and preparation. They can’t scale up quickly enough in the relevant ways in the manner you’re suggesting (before Monday) can they? I see this more as a situation where they admit a large influx will break the site, plan for a general “all hands on deck” day to assess the issues (if any) as they arise, interpret, prioritize work. If hosts have issues with server migrations, deployments, etc. etc. it’s already the weekend and none of it is an option for Monday.
Having feature-rich apps that provide good user experiences will also be vital. Mlem and Jerboa are both open source, and could likely use contributors
We just released a big new update to Jerboa that adds a lot of much needed features and polish. We had 14 new contributors too!
Glad to hear!
There’s also the possibility of existing apps being reworked for lemmy, ive seen that discussed a lot over the last couple days.
Getting enough servers ready in 48 hours notice does not d=sound trivial, I expect the outages will be worse than they were today
I got started here so i could ask questions. Planning on starting an instance on the oracle free tier.
But if I use my own instance to login, but follow the same communities on lemmy.ml , would it make much difference to the traffic/load? Is all I am doing is moving the auth load and nothing else?
Be careful with Oracle - they are known to suspend those “free” instance with no warning. Never trust a tech company that employs more lawyers than engineers. If you’re willing to stick to free - AWS (as much as I hate to say it) is a better choice. The whichever is the cheapest t-type micro instance can run free indefinitely. Beware as well, though - AWS is the most expensive if you want to do /anything/ more that stick to the free tier.
I’m personally sticking to DigitalOcean as for my small personal projects they have proven to have the absolutely best networking out of all the providers. They have also always issued advanced notices about potential outages due to hardware maintenance and yet my stuff had never actually gone down. I suspect it’s because they’re looking after their employees in some great way and so get to hire the absolute best.
Linode used to be a good choice as well, but now that they got acquired by Akamai their networking quality appears to have gone down. It wasn’t the best to begin with, but they had a plethora of distros with hosted repo mirrors to choose from, and I appreciated that. Not sure if they still host the mirrors, to be honest.
You can also check the other big 2 - GCP and Azure, but I personally have not spent much time on them, so can’t comment.
If folks can sign up on your instance and use it as their gateway to the lemmy fediverse, its tremendously helpful for distributing load.
The challenge is, letting people know your instance exists, and when they finally do and you get 30 signups per hour, scaling your instance to keep up.
Long term, you also have to deal with all the sysadmin crap (scaling up/down based on load, security and updates, backups, assholes that DDOS your instance because they don’t like your moderation decisions, copyright take downs, legal requests, etc).
I was thinking to disable approvals on my instance for next week, to hopefully help streamline random signups that come my way and help lessen the load on others.
Interesting…
