Then I hope the answers are enlightening to us both! Takeaways so far are just choose a smaller instance and see if you can find one that specializes in your specific interests. But making sure it’s an instance that will be well and reliably run is the part I can’t figure out yet.
I’m gonna take this back a bit cause my understanding of the All tab has changed significantly from people’s responses. It seems choosing a larger instance is better for discovery, cause the All tab you see is just what people in your instance are subscribed to only, not all of the federated lemmy instances and communities. So I’m going to stick with a large instance for now (lemmy.world), then if I see a lot of content better fitting what I’m looking for on another instance, join that, or at least make an alt there.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
My instance was opened by the mod team of the Brazilian subreddit, they do a great job moderating the subreddit so I trusted them when they called us to move over here. Local experience is cool because is in Portuguese and Brazil centered, so I have a good contrast with All that is almost exclusively in English and European/US centric.
You’ll probably experience more performance issues if you choose larger instances. On the other hand, it’s harder to know how reliable and stable smaller instances are.
Yeah, since I’ve joined lemmy.world has been down quite a few times so I can see the problem of too many people jumping onto one instance. Just figuring out how to find out if a smaller instance is both reliable and stable as you say… Not sure what metrics I can look at or if such metrics exist
No. Lemmy (and any other FediVerse service) can be targeted for take over from any corporation. But there’s a few things that prevents from thinks like… Idk, Facebook buying Instagram or Musk buying Twitter:
The source code of Lemmy is open. Anyone can just take the code and create another “Lemmy alternative” in case of a buy out.
The underlying protocol (Activity Pub) is open too, and managed by W3C (which manages other things like the HTTP protocol). So I think would be very hard for it to highjack to only work for one company.
You are right, a company can create or buy an instance or another similar service (and probably will, see Threads from Instagram). But they cannot interfere with the other ones. If the instance you’re in was bought and you don’t like the new owners, you can just create another account in another instance and keep following the same communities and content (because of the protocol I mentioned) and having the same experience. Unlike what happened to closed services like reddit that you cannot follow subreddits from here.
Tl;Dr: we are not free of corporate interest, but we have tools to prevent a corporate dominance.
I do feel like looking for a small instance is better from what I’ve read so far, but this is the first time I’ve heard control over my feed being different by instance, outside of instances defederating.
I chose sh.itjust.works but since then I’ve realized that it would be better to support instances that are local to me so I think I’ll move to an Australian instance. Supporting local instances might help with regional growth
its more that with more existing users its more likely any particular community will have already been pulled into that instance by someone else already.
I run my own instance so there’s nothing on my all feed outside of communities I already sub to because there are no others on my instance.
As a reminder, instances only get content from a community when someone on that instance is subscribed to it ( so to get it in in the first place they’d search !community then subscribe to it).
Generally, yes, though technically it can happen to any instance with a small or single-person admin team. If an instance has multiple admins it is far less likely that it will one day just die.
that all depends on the instance. small does not mean it will go away. for example my instance is topical. by design, even if it gets “popular” it has some in-built upper limits and if the mass grows beyond them it means I can likely get help paying for the next steps up.
just because an instance is big does not mean its necessarily safe or stable, first its imporant to note that large instances have scaling issues as the deployment for the system is not ready to scale that way, instead they need to deploy to every bigger servers in an inefficient manner or spend a ton of time rolling bespoke deploys. these big servers are just a few volunteers. some big instances are managed by 1-4 technical people, the same numbers a small instance has.
Also it costs money to run large scaled systems, you can run an instance for you and some friends for nearly free if you find a deal and only a few bucks a month if you dont.
So big instance/ small instance does not mean much with stability, they both have thier issues. Something to note, smaller instances are MUCH easier to run.
It feels like starting a new instance is the trendy thing to do, similar to creating some new crypto shitcoin a few years ago. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but I would imagine more deeply rooted instances would generally offer more support and be less likely to disappear.
haha no, instances like this pre-date centralized systems, e-cash and everything else. instead of something hip and new, you are doing something very old, like they way the internet was designed to operate old.
i was running sites like these a decade before reddit came to the fore. The thing that’s “new and weird” is this desire to pile onto a single domain handing control of your feed, personal information and more to a billionaire. If you are into wealth gospel i get it, though they haven’t done as much to earn trust as people seem to think.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m onboard with these decentralized platforms. I’m not questioning the value of this federation system, but the potential volatility of parts of it. The concept of an '‘instance’ may be old, but that seems to be a new buzzword, fit for abuse.
it already has been abused, you came here a bit late and missed the fireworks, there was a massive expulsion of badly behaving instances by many of the instances wanting to remain connected. I was actually quite surprised and impressed at the speed at which admins collectively decided and acted across the network. I actually suspect the ratio of mods:users to be higher here. The ratio of admins:users def is.
Those specs seem great. I would probably just swap the wifi chip and the battery if those are the main things that are failing for you. I would set the resolution to 1080p instead of 4k as well.
It’s very rare I give up on a book but that’s mostly because I choose books I know I’m going to at least find passable entertainment.
The one I should have given up on was “Annihilation.” I hated it starting about 20% in but kept going to see if it got any better. So many people loved it! Nope, in the end I was just angry at myself for reading that boring junk.
I read Annihilation after I saw the movie. The movie stayed with me for weeks afterwards, the book did not. Also, the movie has one of the best CSN songs ever - Helplessly Hoping
Honestly, it would just be nice if that kind of tech could rid me of my (at times excruciating) chronic pain.
I’ve reached the point – years ago – where it has become truly debilitating and there are days and longer periods where I can barely perform any physical action. It is frustrating and my quality of life would improve dramatically if I did not have that constantly hindering me in my daily life.
Forget “dangerous” hobbies; I might actually be able to have a social life again and see my friends or go out to see a movie or go shopping!
kbin.life
Newest