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.

  • Bilb!@lemmy.ml
    English
    63·
    vor 2 Jahren

    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!

  • Ruud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Lemmy.world is a new server, accepting signups. You’re welcome there.

  • comfy@lemmy.mlEnglish
    50·
    vor 2 Jahren

    @nutomic@lemmy.ml It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

    • Provoked Gamer@lemmy.caEnglish
      15·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I agree because this way, new users will learn what and how to use other instances. Plus, it also helps with finding more content, especially if the user picked an instance without many people which makes there be less communities and content they can check out on first glance.

      • Red Army Dog Cooper@lemmy.mlEnglish
        47·
        vor 2 Jahren

        I disagree because it makes the more narrowly focused topic or theme based instances more daluted, makes everything blur together more, I also see it as a detrament to the smaller intances because they will now there local comunity will have less traffic

            • gkd@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              vor 2 Jahren

              I think a client that might select a server for you by default (hopefully a trusted one of course) would make things way more easy to understand for the average user. Then making it easier to add or view communities on other instances.

  • anji@lemmy.anji.nl
    512·
    vor 2 Jahren

    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.

  • aksdb@feddit.deEnglish
    524·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I think lemmy will be bitten in the ass by not having considered clustering/horizontal scaling from the start. Federation alone as a scaling mechanism is only feasible for “nerds”. But if the network wants to grow, we will need a few scale-able large hosted instances. And if their only choice is to scale vertically, there will be a hard limit (unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^).

    Another downside of this design is: you can’t run it with high availability. If there’s only one process per instance, updating it will mean the whole instance is down. Sure, if all goes well this downtime is under a second. But if it doesn’t go well or if a migration is needed, this might quickly become hours.

  • Copio@lemmy.mlEnglish
    45·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Over at https://join-lemmy.org/ , when someone clicked on “Join a Server”, they are presented with a list of instances, it’s not that obvious that these are cross-accessible (yes, the homepage mentioned it, but not here), and people are bound to look for one with the most users.

    Perhaps, add a simple TLI5 explanation/diagram explaining how Lemmy works on https://join-lemmy.org/instances .

    (The documents are also too wordy for most people to care.)

  • lightrush@lemmy.caEnglish
    461·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.

  • Antman@lemmy.mlEnglish
    401·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I have been wondering how cumbersome the Lemmy design will become for some. I love the idea that it is federated and decentralized however these are also major drawbacks for most average users (i.e not multi account users.

    Multiple accounts needed for maximum uptime on different instances. What if I really like my username and its taken on another instance? If one instance is down and i comment with my other account will i then need to manage replies etc through different profiles? What happens if something spins up another instance of a similar domain so that they can get a username of someone to imitate them? I am sure these can be blocked after the fact or will other federated instances be automatically blocked.

    What happens when someone gets bored of their instance and stops it, or it gets blocked, or they start getting unwanted attention. Does this mean all that content then goes into the ether?

    Will this go down the route of whomever provides the instance with the most resources, best load balancing becoming the one, blocking other instances and controlling it as if it were private and independent?

    There are a lot wait and see things, but I am excited to help and see what this great project becomes.

    • Undearius@lemmy.caEnglish
      221·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I’ve experienced a taste of this already. I checked the instance list a couple days ago, and didn’t see one that stood out for my interests, so I created an account on the main lemmy.ml instance.

      I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

      ------

      Another “issue” (a bug or feature?) I’m seeing is there are a lot of duplicate communities between the instances. I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community.

      • 0xc0ba17@lemmy.mlEnglish
        10·
        vor 2 Jahren

        I guess one will eventually “prevail” and become the defacto instance for that community

        Fore niche-y communities, probably. For more generalized ones (like “gaming”), I can see several communities evolve in parallel, each with its own culture and preferred content.

      • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        vor 2 Jahren

        I just registered the same username on another but as far as I can tell, there is no way to merge or link these two accounts. So all the setup I’ve done and all the communities I’ve subscribed to, I have to do over again.

        I believe what you did was necessary. There’s a bug for account export and transfer to another instance, but it’s still open: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/506. It doesn’t appear that Lemmy has an account migration feature like Mastodon does, and consequently you’ve got to migrate your settings manually and then leave some kind of post or link in your old profile to where the new profile is.

        • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          8·
          vor 2 Jahren

          But I understand that it’s possible, since it’s possible on Mastodon, right? IMO a smooth account migration process where you don’t lose anything on the account even if the server randomly shuts down, and it’s just another line in your account history solves a lot of the problems I see with Lemmy.

          Even for registration, it would lower the criticality of instance choice so you have more solutions like using a buffer server that gives people X time to choose another server, randomizing or even just to lower the pressure of it.

          • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
            6·
            vor 2 Jahren

            Yes, it is possible, but was not a priority until now. The boom of users is basically just two days old, the devs have not gotten enough time to catch up yet hehe

            • Obi@sopuli.xyzEnglish
              1·
              vor 2 Jahren

              For sure for sure, can’t be easy keeping up with the sudden influx as it is, let alone launching new features.

              • tmpod@lemmy.ptEnglish
                3·
                vor 2 Jahren

                I’m not a dev, no. But I’ve been here a while and like to help out :)

          • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            vor 2 Jahren

            I’m no expert, but the dev commentary on that ticket suggests that it can be done but hasn’t risen up their priority list… and yeah… Mastodon accomplishing this with ActivityPub which Lemmy also uses suggests it’s possible. I agree it would be valuable, and opens up options when instances churn or get over/under populated.

      • JshKlsn@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        vor 2 Jahren

        That’s me right now.

        Started on beehaw but switched to lemmy.ml because beehaw doesn’t have communities I want.

        • SFloss (they/them)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          91·
          vor 2 Jahren

          You didn’t need to switch. You could’ve followed the same communities on lemmy.ml straight from your Beehaw account. It’s one of the benefits of federation.

          • GuyDudeman@lemmy.mlEnglish
            7·
            vor 2 Jahren

            That needs to be made more clear, in my opinion.

            Also, how does a ban work in that case?

            If you’re signed into an account on Instance A and subscribed to a community on Instance B, and the Instance B admins ban you… Couldn’t you just sign up for a new account on Instance B or Instance C and rejoin/participate in the Instance B community again?

            Also, if the Instance A admins ban your Instance A account from their entire instance, couldn’t you just login to your Instance B account and join all of Instance A’s communities?

            For instance, if LemmyGrad banned my LemmyGrad account for being a “lib”… couldn’t I just use my Beehaw or Lemmy.ml account to participate in the LemmyGrad communities? Would this force them to detect/ban me twice?

            Seems like admins/mods of Lemmy instances and communities are going to have to be doing a multitude more work than the Reddit admins/mods.

            And they’ll have to also be detectives, to suss-out whether or not a user is someone who has previously been banned from their community.

            Once this gets going with bots and whatnot, the federated system seems to be a bit of a spaghetti nightmare.

        • dan1101@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          vor 2 Jahren

          I went for beehaw first too, couldn’t get registration to respond but then saw they didn’t offer downvoting. Strange decision IMO.

    • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      15·
      vor 2 Jahren

      These are some issues I’ve been thinking about as well.

      What’s to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance? Maybe there should be a distributed user index amongst instances to prevent duplicate usernames?

      I think making the federalized infrastructure incumbent upon users to understand and select is not something the average user is going to bother with. This is complicated problem, I don’t know the answer might be off the top of my head.

      And what happens when an instance goes down? Does every user and their history get torched? Is there a migration process or at least a decommissioning policy in place?

    • naoseiquemsou@lemmy.mlEnglish
      91·
      vor 2 Jahren

      You made some good points. We often forget that most people have trouble with simple technical concepts, and the mere fact of having no simple and straightforward answer to “where do I register?” Is something that can inibit a lot of users.

      This happens so much in the open source world. Things that are obvious to us can be difficult to others, but open systems aren’t designed for the general public.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
    38·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Another thing:

    We do need more site admins to help us handle the applications and moderation.

    For obvious reasons, we prefer ppl who have been here for a long time, and post / comment consistently. If you’d like to help us out, so that nutomic and I can focus on coding, that would be splendid.

    • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      13·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I’d raise my hand, but our own instance is blowing up, so it’s probably not a good idea :)

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6·
        vor 2 Jahren

        We’d love to have you if you can spare the time! But ya make sure you can manage the load on blahaj first.

    • ඞmir@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I can handle some applications daily, and I’m also planning to grow some more niche communities :)

    • whiny9130@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      vor 2 Jahren

      I mean I’d love to help - either modding someone’s server, offering sysadmin support, or starting my own #lemmy or #kbin instance :)

  • LoreleiSankTheShip@lemmy.mlEnglish
    37·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I tried like 4 or 5 instances before coming to lemmy.ml, but none of them were taking applications anymore. Finding even those was a hassle, since all I got was a list of domains without any details as to what the instance is about or if they allowed newcomers.

    Now that I’ve setup everything, Lemmy does seem like nice alternative to Reddit, but as someone from the outside, all of this is daunting.

  • UnpopularBrainRot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    321·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I sent my registration yesterday, because I signed in another instance, one from my country, but I couldn’t see all the post and no comments from lemmy.ml even thought is supposedly linked, so thank you for approving my account.

    Even if I’m a tech savvy person I found the whole experience of joining lemmy pretty bad, I like the concept of federation, but I think it’s too confusing to normal people, it really needs to be more seamless if you want to grow, how? idk, I was thinking some sort of replication, when you sign up, you are registered to the main instance (this) and given the choice to select other instances, automatically selecting let’s say another 3 based on your location, then your account is synced in all the registered and linked instances, when you login if an instance is experiencing overload then it switches to another one. I don’t know if this is realistic or out of the scope of Lemmy, or maybe against the philosophy of it. I’m just rambling.

    I’m just glad that there is an open alternative for anonymous social interaction in this day of walled internet services such as discord, twitter, facebook etc. and I wish you all the success.

  • Generator@lemmy.ptEnglish
    312·
    vor 2 Jahren

    If now is struggling then on June 12 will be a nightmare.
    Reddit will go dark in protest, many messages to join Lemmy, most instances will be overloaded or even DDoS with so many users, like what happen with Mastodon.

      • Generator@lemmy.pt
        11·
        vor 2 Jahren

        Not only fediverse, back in the day when reddit was cool servers outages was a daily thing

        • JshKlsn@lemmy.ml
          5·
          vor 2 Jahren

          Wasn’t even that long ago. I’d say only the past 3 or so years has Reddit stopped showing me the “oOps U BwoKe WokEy WedDit” screen on a regular basis. Up until then, I’d get that screen a good 20+ times per day.

  • darkkite@lemmy.mlEnglish
    28·
    vor 2 Jahren

    I wonder if a longer term solution would be to auto rotate the server list to bump less popular ones.

  • Barbarian@lemmy.mlEnglish
    26·
    vor 2 Jahren

    Users are likely going to see this as it’s the “official” Lemmy instance when trying to join for the first time.

    Any admins of instances that are accepting people, give your best elevator pitch!