Lemmy is not supposed to replace reddit. Lemmy is it’s own thing that has already existed for years now. The benefit of Lemmy over individual forums is the interconnectivity of separate communities and being able to view content from multiple communities in one single feed. You can subscribe to communities and view all your subscribed community posts in one feed. Theres also the All sort on the main page, which essentially functions as Lemmy front page. Its also, as you said, not centrally controlled. So if one part fails the rest can continue as normal. That makes it pretty robust. But it isn’t meant to replace reddit, a massive social media platform with millions of users.
what blew my mind, and the minds of many other people on reddit is that they (reddit) have 2,000 employees and yet still can’t piece together a good and accessible experience for their users…
No matter how many developers you get, you’re never going to have a good product if the guy calling the shots won’t allow it. I’m confident that the developers working on Reddit probably know damn well that their product is trash and there’s nothing they can do about it because their job isn’t “make a good site” its “do what your boss tells you to do”
A good frame of reference would be the VPS that lemmy.world is running on imo. Looks like they upgraded to a 4 core/16gb setup to handle the influx of users, so if your instance is running under 1k users, I believe those specs would be sufficient.
If it starts chugging, I wonder how well it’d work to run the server on the laptop and the DB on a VPS (or vice versa).
I currently have 3 - one on Lemmy.ml, one on sh.itjust.works, and one on kbin.social. I did this for a number of reasons:
If something happens to one instance, especially during growing pains where user influx is indistinguishable from a DDOS, I’ve got a “backup” where I can still be active from.
These three (and beehaw, but I’m still waiting for approval over there) seem to be the larger (and/or fastest growing) instances - currently there’s an issue with Lemmy where if you “click-through” to a community on another instance, the authentication doesn’t carry - so you have to copy the link, return to your “home instance” and search for the link, then you can visit via your home instance and interact. Clumsy (but hopefully corrected eventually). By having an account already on these instances, clicking through isn’t a problem because I’ve got an account over there. (Note: I’m not talking about interacting with posts across instances, that works fine).
Kbin.social showed me that instances can have a different “look-and-feel” from each other. While Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, and beehaw are all clones of each other, Kbin has a prettier UX. Until apps start showing up, the homepage of your chosen instance is how Lemmy will look for you across the fediverse.
Different instances have different home feeds, for some reason. I would expect that all settings being equal (view from all instead of local, or view subscribed and having the same subscriptions on each instance) they should all return a similar feed - but they don’t. Not sure why, if my understanding about how this all aggregates together works - I’m still testing.
Different instances have different philosophies and different rules - some allow porn (but most don’t, and even on the ones that do I haven’t seen any yet - and yes I have NSFW enabled). But I also don’t want to end up with a home-instance that’s another echo chamber of one certain point of view - and while communities from those instances can be filtered individually, it’d be nice to have a local instance that’s already not an echo chamber.
It’s still early enough that I’m not “married” to a particular instance yet, so now is the time to experiment and test. And since there’s no way (yet) to migrate an account, settings, subscriptions from one instance to another, now’s the time to explore and branch out and look around before I really get settled-in.
Edit: and apparently numbered points don’t work. Good to know.
A couple of months ago our company decided to standardise on only one GNU/Linux distro and they chose PopOS. While the default desktop is better then stocj GNOME it was still far away to what I am used from the powerful, featureful and customizable KDE Plasma so after about two weeks I switched to KDE Plasma (unfortunately they have an extremely old version in their repos, but still much better).
I can only guess that Cosmic will be on pair to their current improved GNOME but will still be way lacking compared to what even an old KDE Plasma offers. And I would also much more like to see if they put more attention to keeping more updated KDE Plasma and KDE software packages in their repo. Even for Cosmic I think they would be much better of basing it on the extremely flexible and configurable KDE Plasma base and make it a heavy modification of this.
kbin.life
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