Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.
If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it’s really you. Would be cool. 😎
Yeah I think the fediverse biggest limitation in general to achieving most of its stated goals is the fact that accounts are bound tightly to an instance
You’re thinking about it the wrong way.
I’ve had to go through a major change in thinking and adjust my interpretation in major ways.
I follow nine other instances.
Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn’t dependent on one instance.
Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.
It’s just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It’s going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.
Also…there’s a non-zero chance it’s getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.
What’s DDOS?
DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.
Distributed denial of service.
That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.
I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.
Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.
But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.
There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.
I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn’t like you can extort any money out of lemmy.
Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there’s been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they’re going after any site that doesn’t have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.
The Lemmy.world server runs on a 16mhz 386dx and has 16mb of ram. It just does that sometimes.
It temporarily goes down when the laptop gets moved to another Starbucks location.
Lemmy is still alpha software, thrust into the limelight by the fall of Reddit. It is still in its infancy. Reddit has had over 18 years to get it right. So it will take some time.
I didn’t think of it that way.
Lemmy.world is super big AND being attacked constantly. Smaller instances don’t have these issues and they are stable and fast. You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I’m on lemmy.today and it’s fast and stable. Come join us and you will see.
Basically use the fediverse the way it was meant to be used.
You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I had no idea, just tried and you are right. Do you know if everything works the same, like moderation?
Yeah it’s all federated. If you get banned from a community on Lemmy.world, you will not be able to access it from Lemmy.today for example (with your lemmy.today user account).
This is the really super cool part about the fediverse. People don’t realize… This is where the magic is.
If Lemmy.world is down, you still access posts and threads and make posts etc from lemmy.today… And it all syncs when Lemmy.world is up again.
Another mind blowing moment is when you realize you can read and post on Lemmy from Mastadon… So you can combine interacting with Mastadon and Lemmy in the same conversion.
Your instance only has two communities and they’re both about Lemmy. Seems a bit boring to me. Sorry.
I guess you need to do some more research on how Lemmy works.
You can follow any community from any instance. For now you could create an account at some lesser populated instances, I had one on lemmy.ml, made another account on monyet.cc. It’s a minor inconvenience that you have to subscribe to communities but other than that my experience with lemmy has been very good.
You can connect other communities from small instances, that’s the point of the fediverse.
This should be put in large letters on the join lemmy site so people can understand the point of the fediverse…
Local communities are totally irrelevant when deciding which instance should host your account.
I thought the point was to join communities. Am I wrong?
You can join any community on any instance from any other instance, as long as the admin hasn’t blocked it.
So I don’t get the problem then.
… exactly?
Someone pointed out an advantage of smaller instances and you were the one that said small instances have a problem (lack of communities), and I’m the one pointing out that your supposed problem does not, in fact, exist.
TL;DR small instance good
Yeah it’s just getting started, and you can start new communities if you like. But no point starting ones that already exists on other instances.
The amount of local communities doesn’t matter much, Im subscribed to like 100 remote communities anyway. :)
Reread their last sentence.
What instance you use as your home instance is irrelevant unless it has been defederated from an unusual amount of instances. You likely don’t want to try and use lemmygrad as your home lol.
Otherwise, home instance is only going to determine your local feed. Which is pretty much the least used feed anywhere other than maybe beehaw. Discovery via all combined with searches lets you populate your subscribed feed, so those are the ones that you’ll use most.
Lemmy is federated by design. If you try and treat instances like some kind of dedicated site the way reddit was, you might as well not use it at all because you’ll be missing out on the benefits federation brings to the format.
Are you old enough to remember geocities? It had these circles where individual sites within geocities would link to each other. You would have your own site, but be linked to maybe hundreds of others. That’s closer to what lemmy is than the kind of reddit experience you’re probably used to.
Never heard of it.
You think theyre all siloed off from each other or something? I’m literally the only user on my instance and there is 1 community with 0 posts yet here I am, on another instance.
I’ve started a 2nd account on another instance just for situations like that.
Isn’t that spamming though?
Not at all, it’s perfectly fine to have accounts on multiple instances.
Do you mean the same username or different usernames? I may be misunderstanding your point.
That’s entirely up to you, it can be the same username if you want. Speaking as an instance admin, there is no problem with users creating multiple accounts across instances, even if they’re the same username.
Spam would be creating as many usernames as you can on any given instance (e.g. trying to register 100 users on lemmy.world because reasons) - there’s obviously a problem with that. Creating you@instance1, you@instance2 and you@instanceN is perfectly fine.
I thought that you had to have the same username to identify yourself.
Not at all. You don’t have to identify as yourself on every instance you have an account. It’s literally a different account. You can keep a backup of all your subscriptions/follows/etc from one to the other or you can treat them as two entirely different identities. Just don’t have them generate a lot of pointless traffic between each other (like arguing with yourself on a post or something).
Wouldn’t it be easier to be the same person across all of the communities and instances rather than split your personality?
How do you keep communities aligned across the accounts?
I made a tool that can help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It allows you to synchronize subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings between accounts.
(though FYI different versions only gracefully handle a specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3 - see my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2094948 )
EDIT: Second link isn’t working - must be a Lemmy bug. But you can see it as a recent post on my profile.
specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3
What API-breaking changes did you find?
A super minor one, but there’s a new “infinite scrolling” boolean added to the user settings.
Thank you.
Its on its infancy and remember this is not run by a big corporation its run by volunteers. If you dont like feel free to go back to reddit.
Edit: Hey guys so yeah this comment was too harsh against newcomers to the platform and I would like to apologize.
While you are correct, your tone is quite dismissive and unwelcoming. If it’s to be a replacement, it’s reliability is relevant. On most of the update posts ive seen, users are generally appreciative of the work done.
You got me in the first half… But then
I know it was a strong comment but it just that some people want everything so easy to use and I understand that they are busy , have a job , family , etc. Thats why I suggested it to go back to reddit.
It’s definitely bad if you can’t use a service you’d like to use but one has to remember that this isn’t run by someone with millions of dollars at their fingertips. And the reason for that is simple: This service doesn’t exploit it’s users.
Best bet is probably to create an account on Lemmy and another on Kbin. Not only is it simply not likely for two instances to go down, but they’re also different platforms, so further decreases the likelihood. And you can see all the same content.
I’m talking out of my ass, but software devs rarely think about scalability, backup, and high availability.
I’m talking out of my ass
the one accurate statement in this comment.
How many software devs do you actually know lmao
This might be of interest: https://lemmy-status.org/
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
A bit more specific to Lemmy world.
