Fediverse

Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.

Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.

Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.

It is a good point but are people really joining lemmy.world en mass still and if so why don't the admins close registrations?

Everyone is welcome to join my small instance at endlesstalk.org. I have also setup the same alternative UI's as lemmy.world, if that rocks your boat!.

don't see the benefit tbh. software will scale, or not, if not people will leave for others

Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!

Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.

One problem I foresee with smaller instances is discovery. As we know, if someone creates a new community somewhere else, your instance will onlyrecognise it once someone searches for it.

On a large instance like lemmy.world, there's a good chance that someone else did, and you can stumble upon it by browsing /all. On a smaller instance this may not happen unless it's set up to discover and thus mirror every community everywhere.

We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance

But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.

If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I'll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can't blame people for not wanting to engage with that.

But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against "the spirit of the fediverse". But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.

I joined a local instance of mastodonte. I had days without being able to access my stuff, and finally recreated an account on the main mastodonte instance. So this time I directly picked a large instance.

It is the strength and the weakness of it all.

On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.

Just created my account on sopuli.xyz before I realised I could migrate the whole account from Lemmy.world but have had zero downtime since then so that’s a positive.

Lemmy.world's issues at present are due to DDOS attacks, not high user count

Thanks for making this post, I feel like it can't be repeated enough. People sit on Lemmy.world instead of creating an account somewhere else where they can literally read and comment on previous posts from Lemmy.world, and then it all gets synked when it's up again.

It's like email guys - the entire global email system doesn't stop because your company email server has technical issues.

This goes for anyone in the fediverse, not just lemmy users. I am on kbin which may not have as much options as lemmy to migrate to, but I will also be looking out for instances that match my interests more.

I'm not sure I understand. If I joined lemmy.world and subbed to stuff I like that has enough users to be interesting you're saying, unsubscribe from those and join a different one with less users? I don't know how that's supposed to work?

Or are you saying join a different sever, log in there, and then pull the content from lemmy.world? That somehow helps with the load?

What about the instances I created on Lemmy.world? Will I be able to moderate them from other instances?

Not an option for me yet. Especially after I found out some instances federate messages slowly. Like up to an hour late slowly.

I moved to a smaller instance today. One thing that I've noticed that isn't the same, is the Top All Time is showing different posts and vote counts on certain subs. I think I've noticed it only happens in the subs that I've interacted from the small instance for the first time. Or, if someone from my small instance interacted with it last week, there will be 7 days of history, but nothing beyond that. IDK if that's true or not, just what I've observed today.

I've subscribed to all the same communities as when I was on lemmy.world, but my feed seems slower and quieter.

I mean, right now the main thing that would get me a better experience is seeing more activity, not less.

Same here. My main account is on lemmynsfw and it’s down atm :/

I really want to see a data viz of whether/how much users are spreading out. Anyone got the data on user counts over time by instance?

And you can easily copy over all your subs/communities using Lasim, so the change to an account on a smaller instance is almost transparent.

I started on lemmy.world, then decided to learn self-hosting server infrastructure and made my own instance. Found a script that allows me to "auto-discover" all communities from given instance URLs, so I just added the instances that interest me. Boom, I have an instance with all of my favorite instances searchable and discoverable on "All".

For those interested in the script you can find it here. Do note that you should NOT use the default settings and make sure to use an instance whitelist, otherwise it'll pull every instance ever.