for those of you who are passionate about #linux#gaming, even if on the #computer or #SteamDeck, be that on #arch, #fedora, #ubuntu or something else, I recommend you subscribe to the lemi sub...what, reddit, thread? dedicated to this: @linux_gaming
Even if you don't make an account on lemi.world or another such instance, you can subscribe to the sub, by putting that handle in your search bar, or clicking it here if you're on mastodon, since lemi is a fediverse platform. I dk if the r/linuxgaming community will be going away soon, but given what's happening with reddit, maybe it won't shut down when the protests are over, if they ever will be, which I hope is not likely.
Redundancy (multiple instances making communities on the same subject) is a thing that’ll happen. I’m already subbed to communities on several instances dedicated to the same subjects. That can have an advantage, though, in that communities on the same subject but different instances can provide different perspectives on the subject depending on the makeup of the community in each instance (membership, modding, etc). Don’t like the community in one instance? Unsub from that one and hop on over to another one. Having one account able to access multiple instances allows for that. It can also help if one community or instance goes down for whatever reason, there may be another community/instance open where you can keep interacting. So I don’t see the redundancy thing as necessarily a problem.
It seems like they are down for a longer time now. How will they recover? Does longer down mean they will have to do more catching up with other instances? Can I get updates somewhere?
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
I would be cautious too if I were a sub owner and guiding people to an alternative honestly. Lemmy and Kbin both are relatively unstable right now, even if they are pretty good. Waiting a little to see which instances are more stable and likely to last is a good move before planting people somewhere and making an official replacement sub.
I hope to see this community take off and take precedence over the one on lemmy.ml. I have been disappointed the past couple of days because most of the IT related subs seemed to be there and they have only been intermittently available and they seem to be having some trouble with federating their content to other instances. It’s not their fault, they are clearly being hugged much too tightly.
Also I know its just the nature of things to have competing subs, even on Reddit it happened. But I’d prefer not to have a split-brain situation with a sysadmin community nor do I want to be forced in to cross posting everything to both communities to increase my chances of engagement.
I think we’ll see a temporary “return to normalcy” after the protest finishes and most subs come back online. But come June 30 and the end of third-party apps, we’ll see a bunch of users come back to Lemmy/Kbin again.
In a way, this seems like the best way of driving things. The protest has raised awareness and got a ton of development work going, and then there’s going to be a respite giving instances time to prepare themselves for the second surge.
I started my own instance and do currently not intend to open it for others (besides, maybe, close friends and family).
My intention are
to learn more about the concepts
evaluate how reliable the replication of comments and posts works
maybe create my own pseudo-community just for myself, as kind of a simplified blog
Reading other posts in this sub, I saw it is still seen as offloading the main servers, as the replication of the data is a low load compared to serving the UI. Maybe one of these motivations apply to you, too? Or you find another one? At the end of the day, host your own instance if you want to :-)
What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems...
I run a few groups, like @fediversenews, mostly on Friendica. It's okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has....
Anyway yeah I’m liking Lemmy and the fediverse so far. I actually prefer the UI/UX of kbin.social more for desktop, but Jerboa is great for mobile. If they stay actively in development it’s going to be hard to beat IMO
I’ve followed from Fark to StumbleUpon to Digg to Reddit, and now many years later, to Lemmy. I think the communities being spread across instances is extremely powerful for overall global community resiliency (if the separation is respected and we don’t end up with a bunch of duplicated “subs” everywhere).
I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of people say this today, but the one thing I feel the most is excitement. The chaos reminds me of the early-ish days (~1996?) of the web when everything was discoverable and not already aggregated to be served up to you inbetween advertisements.
Used Reddit for 13 years, tried out Kbin and Lemmy yesterday and settled on Lemmy.
Long story short, I’m going back to Reddit.
There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting. Most internet users have been trained to be extremely wary of odd or unusual things, so having anything besides .com/.net/.org will turn away a huge portion of users.
I initially setup an account on Lemmy.world, then realized that I couldn’t migrate it to another server and that when I deleted that account on that server all my comments were deleted.
Deciphering the distributed nature of it took me, a relatively tech-friendly person, almost the entire day and several ‘What the fuck?’ posts. I now understand it more. There are some very low-level guides that have been haphazardly put together, but there absolutely needs to be a MUCH smoother guide/explanation to this whole thing. That learning process will turn people away for sure.
BECAUSE I understand it more now, I’m left feeling VERY uncomfortable about my data security. If this is going to become a mainstream thing, as it reaches and before it gets to that critical mass of users, there’s going to be SO. MANY. SECURITY ISSUES. There’s no 2fa at all, hacking and user-account hacking is just going to run rampant, and I’m left wondering ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS. The easy-to-see future here is that Lemmy will fail to attract a critical mass of people because they’ll initially arrive, after a few months their instances will just cease to exist/get shut down/the hosts will decide its no longer a fun hobby to do.
With a large corporation, they have the staff and resources to secure and maintain the servers physically and digitally, and keep staff up-to-date on current infosec threats and get out in front of them. Beyond that, if there IS a breach, they have the ability to recognize it, understand the legalities and requirements of reporting it, and can be held accountable by regulatory bodies. Joe doesn’t have the resources to really maintain and keep a server running, nor the knowledge of his responsibilities for keeping the data safe digitally or physically.
On top of that, if Joe’s basement loses power/gets hacked/Joe decides he’s moving to San Fransisco and can’t bring his NAS with him and the server goes down, and that’s where my instance is hosted well there goes my entire account/comments/data.
Finding and subbing to communities is painfully difficult. It should be one-click, but somewhere I need to goto an external list, find what I want, and then copy/paste the URL into the search… and then 50% of the time, it doesn’t work. This is an understandable growing pain and can likely be fixed by UI/UX upgrades, but for now it’s a definite turn-off.
There simply is no content. I’m not a creator, I want content aggregated for me, and I’ve gotten used to having a single place to get it from that floods me with thousands of different articles/memes/posts/etc every minute. Until the user base arrives in one single place and starts generating content, there’s no reason for most people like me to be there as by far the larger number of users never create anything at all and only exist to consume the content generated.
For those self-hosting a lemmy instance, what hardware are you using? I am currently using a small Hetzner VPS. It has 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM and 40GB SSD storage. My instance is currently just in testing with me as the only user, but I plan to use it for close friends or family that may want to try this out, but might not want to sign...
5~ USD a month. Working great for personal use and I’d imagine a handful of users. Hosted in a data center that is very close to me.
Also fwiw: 4 days of lemmy. I am subbed to a bunch of stuff. I’ve only uploaded like three pictures to my instance… All that space is thumbnails from other instances.
Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network...
That’s true, and the point I guess. You sub to all relevant communities and the overlap isn’t an issue because it’s different communities with different instances making content with others interacting through federation. The “subreddit” is diversified to the top communities in all of the highest subscribed instances. It’s just the nature of the beast, but once you find all the top comms it probably doesn’t seem so bad.
That depended on the subs you were in IMO, there was a lot of that but there were others that still had worthwhile stuff that wasn’t just silly shitposting for fun. Now we’ve got Lemmy though and multiple instances of it!
(I’m not sure yet the best or recommened way to link directly to a post.)
This highlights the point in that post. I’m certainly not disuading anyone from joining this new community and hope everyone finds the best one that fits them. I’ll keep my eye on your new community. Good luck!
When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it’ll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?...
I feel that, while lemmy is still a work in progress, it is already pretty adequate for solving this need. If you want to subscribe to other instances you can do it from within your insance by going up to communities and searching. You can also click the all tab and see a bunch of instances from around lemmy that your instance is federated with.
I think mastadon struggled with this because the twitter model is to follow people and depending how far removed the servers are this can be trickier. Compared to lemmy where people interested in a single subject will likely target and find the subject theyre interested in and bring themselves together naturally.
Furthermore I think some people are splitting up and dividing into sub instances and tiny subjects a little prematurely. Reddit didnt get super esoteric with it’s subs until it got big and the larger subs either declined or got too noisy to talk about certain things. Like for example how beehaw has an operatingsystems instance instead of a linux, ubuntu, macos, windows, fedora, archinux, opensuse, openbsd, etc. Right now there arent enough of us that we dont need to subdivide.
While I’m not interested in encouraging /r/selfhosted users to leave reddit, I thought it would be good to have some discussion around the possibilities for a selfhosted community on lemmy....
I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list....
I think of it like [email protected] instead of just selfhosted. Sure there may be duplicate communities on different instances but over time I think there will be more people gravitating to a particular community and people will just sub there from then on and the others will become more dormant. When I refer to a community I’ll just use the full name ([email protected]) and not just the community name (selfhosted)
Systems and software engineer here. I’m curious how the Lemmy project plans on scaling media uploads. It doesn’t seem feasible to host on an instance server. Even Reddit had a problem with media over the years and some subs to this day enforce offloading media to third party.
Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion....
What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
You register your account on sh.itjust.works, that’s where all the info you care about resides. Your list of subscribed communities resides there. When you read a post, it gets fetched out of the db on sh.itjust.works (irrespective of where the home instance for that post’s community is… when you read it it comes out of the database on your home instance), and when you comment on a post, that gets written to the db on your home instance. Your home instance a standalone fully functioning thing.
When you subscribe to a remote community like this one, you tell your home instance "keep up to date with posts and comments for this community and let me know about them. Your home instance asynchronously gets all those updates while you’re asleep or whatever so it can show them to you out of its local database when you come back. If more users on sh.itjust.works subscribe to the same community… there’s no incremental overhead. All ya’lls instance is ALREADY subscribed to that sub. So other users on your instance can sub to it for free, it’s already in the instance’s database.
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail?
If lemmy.ml (where this community is homed) falls over from being overloaded or just is broken for whatever reason, your instance is unaffected. You can still read posts and make comments. This community however… is affected. New posts and comments for this community might come through intermitently or not at all for you (and everyone in the lemmyverse) because the community’s home server isn’t working well enough to reliably deliver them over federated replication. You can still read older posts and comments that have already been synced to your home instance, but new ones might not arrive. You might also see weird stuff like being able to see new comments from other sh.itjust.works users on this community, since those get written to your db before getting federated back to the community’s home server. But mostly updates from other instances stop or get unreliable.
If sh.itjust.works falls over for some reason… well… that sucks for you. You can’t log in or browse anything on it. You can still visit this sub at lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy/ as long as lemmy.ml is working and you’ll be able to see the posts and comments that other accounts make. But you’ll be an anonymous read-only browser, you won’t be able to post or comment until sh.itjust.works comes back online (or you make a new account elsewhere and lose all your comment history and subscription list).
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs?
I don’t think that’s a good assumption. lemmy.ml is hosted on OVH, a cloud provider. My home instance on lemmy.world is hosted by admins that run something like a 32 CPU mastodon instance. Most instances with over 100 users are running on some kind of probably modest but “real” cloud instance. The admins are volunteers, but often smart technical folks paying for small but real compute infrastructure.
The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
Anticipating growing pains isn’t wrong, it’s probably gonna happen. But the devs are gonna find and work on the biggest performance problems so that people can viably run bigger instances, and instance admins are gonna run bigger hardware and ask for donations or run patreons to cover the cost. In my opinion, the bigger worry is that Lemmy will fizzle… not that it will spectacularly explode. As long as people join and contribute and are interested, we’ll find a way to improve scalability and performance. The death knell would be if people get bored and leave, but compute capacity won’t be the problem in that scenario.
My (Stupid) Ideas (cause I have no idea)
Disclaimer: I’m no IT expert/man. I’m just wondering what structure these instances should be....
What happend to lemmy.ml? EDIT: Works with ipv6 disabled
It seems like they are down for a longer time now. How will they recover? Does longer down mean they will have to do more catching up with other instances? Can I get updates somewhere?
Reddit communities with millions of followers plan to extend the blackout indefinitely (www.theverge.com)
Calling all /r/sysadmin reddit refugees!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1163202...
So, how do we think this ends?
It can go one of a few ways....
Should I host my own instance if I don't intend to run a community?
Is there any benefit to host my own instance?
Are we using Lemmy correctly?
What I think could make Lemmy superior to Reddit is the ability to create themed-instances that are all linked together which feels like the entire point. I’ve noticed that a lot of instances are trying to be a catch-all Reddit replacement by imitating specific subs which is understandable given the circumstances but seems...
Welcome to Programmer Humor
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!...
Redditors, how do you like Lemmy?
I run a few groups, like @fediversenews, mostly on Friendica. It's okay, but Friendica resembles Facebook Groups more than Reddit. I also like the moderation options that Lemmy has....
What hardware are you using for your self-hosted lemmy instance?
For those self-hosting a lemmy instance, what hardware are you using? I am currently using a small Hetzner VPS. It has 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM and 40GB SSD storage. My instance is currently just in testing with me as the only user, but I plan to use it for close friends or family that may want to try this out, but might not want to sign...
Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?
Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network...
Slashdot -> Fark -> Digg -> Reddit -> Lemmy
It's been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.
Lemmy.world c/futurama subscribers just hit 56! (lemmy.world)
Just for lemmy.world subscribers… I think we have a lot more from other instances...
Ask Lemmy is now LIVE! (lemmy.world)
Come join the community for insightful and thought provoking questions....
How can lemmy handle 5k+ signups per hour on Monday?
When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it’ll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?...
current lemmy status (lemmy.world)
People need to realize you can use alternatives
What is the Right Place for the SelfHosted Community?
While I’m not interested in encouraging /r/selfhosted users to leave reddit, I thought it would be good to have some discussion around the possibilities for a selfhosted community on lemmy....
Is there a way to create Super Communities?
I’ve noticed in the explosion that we are getting duplicate communities in multiple instances. This is ultimately gonna hinder community growth as eventually communities like ‘cats’ will exist in hundreds of places all with their own micro groups, and some users will end up subscribing to duplicates in their list....
How many users could you host on a self hosted lemmy instance?
Upload of around 40mbps
I'm a sys- and database admin
My job has been Database Admin for the past 25 years, still is. But nowadays it’s more shifting to infrastructure and automation....
Some Lemmy Technical Questions
Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion....