This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.

However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.

You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.

  • radarsat1@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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?

    • TrippyTortuga@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      AFAICT no. There is an open issue on the Lemmy GitHub repo. In general, all ActivityPub services I’ve used have this same account stratification problem.

    • Nick Cocklin@masto.ai
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      1 year ago

      @radarsat1 @nutomic I’m still working this out myself, but you can browse Lemmy on any account, and then comment from your mastodon account by searching the commenter (@radarsat1 in the search field did it for me), and then replying to them on mastodon. Pretty cool how it’s linked, plenty of opportunities to build apps that make interacting between servers easier.

    • Einar@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think this is key. Have the possibility to move an account to another instance or have it spread out somehow. This would also secure the account in case an instance dies for some reason.

    • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I would appreciate this as well. Besides the flood of users issue, this server’s theme (Marxist-Leninist) doesn’t mesh with my politics. I created it in the early days of Lemmy, so I have an extensive history that I am loath to sacrifice.

  • TheYang@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml

    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?

    • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think they said they’re at the highest tier of their provider. May need to migrate to a different provider and get a beefier setup.

        • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          They do, but I’m not sure how well, I’m not a dev, and have no programming knowledge, so looking at the documentation looks like arcane hieroglyphs.

          I’m pretty sure I read a comment about it from one of the devs, but can’t recall the fine details of the conversation.

        • TrippyTortuga@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          In theory, they can. But it depends on how it’s deployed.

          From my cursory look at the deployment docs, Lemmy’s default deployment option is via docker. It relies on a postgreSQL server, which may or may not scale horizontally depending on the admin’s choice of implementation. For example, a deployment on AWS using Aurora would theoretically utilize auto-scaling.

          I haven’t personally deployed an instance so, grain of salt.

          EDIT: A good discussion about DB scaling here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3005

  • Gecko@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    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…

  • 777@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

    • Parsley@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There is a new announcement saying they upgraded hardware yet again

  • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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!

  • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Flannel Bear@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      There’s a website I highly recommend called fediverse observer, it doesn’t really go based on interest, but it has some other factors it uses and I really like it.

    • vocornflakes@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think that there should be some meaningful way to “preview” aspects of one instance that may make it more attractive than another instance to a new user. I just joined lemmy.world today simply because it seemed the most generic. Onboarding process could use some work; https://lemmy.world/post/37906 is great at explaining it but people will only really see it for the first time once they join…

      Also I have no clue if that second link works. ¯\(ツ)

      • Ghostalmedia@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        You probably don’t want my code if you want a stable platform. ;)

        That said, I dig what y’all are doing, and I’m veteran experience / interaction designer who’s been around the block for a few decades. So I might be able to find some time to mockup some experience concepts and or help to run user tests with audiences that your curious about.

        • usernotfound@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I’m more of a backender myself, but I think some UX mockup would go a long way in getting this improved.

  • rusty_spoon@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

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

  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Neil@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Except (as far as I’m aware) your account only exists on one instance. So, if I end up on beehaw.org due to the round-robin, my account on lemmy.ml will not authenticate to that instance. I would have to have a separate account per instance which is hundreds of accounts.

  • highduc@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It seems the lemmy.ml instance is really slow, times out, etc. I fear this will be a bad experience for new users migrating from reddit. Anything we can do? Any place to donate to scale it up, or would it be a good idea for existing users to migrate ourselves to different instances?

    edit: I did find the donate heart at the top. Not sure how fast that’ll improve things but I did make a small donation.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • gnoop@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      While it might not be too late for that update, it would require some reconciliation to happen. There’s the potential for multiple users and communities of the same name across servers that would need to be considered.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Not sure why you reference Matrix, which has even worse scaling issues as it indeed tries to replicate nearly the entire network on every server.

      The Fediverse is really just working how the general web does, just with some standardized API for websites to interact. It’s not perfect, but it works and has proven to be relatively scalable.

      It sounds a bit like you had a bit too much of the Bluesky cool-aid, which indeed replicates nearly all of the mistakes of Matrix and makes it impossible to scale via small community owned servers instead of big company owned data-centers (which might be by design?).

      • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
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        1 year ago

        Well yeah, point taken that replicating everything everywhere and forever might be impossible. But I do believe at a minimum my identity should be portable and accessing Fedi (ie. in microblogging: posting and viewing a feed of the latest posts of my follows) should be decoupled from which instance I pick to access the Fediverse.

        I don’t particularly like how owners of instances which grew are now essentially locked in to having to spend 100s or 1000s of dollars a month keeping their now expensive instances running and providing service. This is a bad place to be for a platform ran by volunteers. Letting instance owners scale their service down as well as up would be ideal. But this requires at least decentralized identity, and at best some form of content hosting redundancy…

        It’s easy to say the current architecture of Fedi works when it’s still small. Your instance has 139 users… That’s not intended as a slight. Hosting instances is good and I applaud you for it! But I wish it were easier to more equally share the load once the platform becomes more popular.