For hours today, yesterday, and intermittently since I’ve been on here (a month or so) lemmy stops loading using jerboa, liftoff, and a web browser.
The site isn’t listed on any down detector I know of, and each app gives different errors but ultimately just won’t load.
It’s often enough that recently when I consider jumping on here I just don’t because there will probably be an issue. Ranging from not loading, JSON errors, or just blank screens and my comments not working…
What’s going on? Is there a status page for these places?
I bailed on them for now and made an account on a much smaller instance so everything loads again. Thankfully with federation you can still see all the same content, you just need to set up subscriptions again on the new account if you choose to go that route.
I suggested joining a new instance in another support thread.
For some reason, even though it’s the whole philosophy behind federated networking, people didn’t like the idea.
Is the mentality here degrading to levels of Reddit fanboy-ism? If so, I’m DEFINITELY gonna migrate
I was really surprised by this too but yeah, people want to be on the same largest instance. I guess it’s a community feeling by doing that. Or at least a feeling of safety, since it’s unlikely the instance shuts down.
In addition to a large instance being less likely to shut down and (presumably) having more resources, there’s an additional advantage to being on a larger instance: you have a more comprehensive “All” feed. Since federation with a remote feed isn’t established until (IIRC) someone subscribes to it, an instance with a larger user base should contain more subscriptions to a wider variety of content. Of course, not everyone will like that and you lose out on Beehaw content if you’re on the two largest Lemmy instances, but I think it applies in general.
At this point, I don’t believe lemmy.world will shut down. But the constant outages are going to push people away regardless. Luckily people have nearly limitless options of instances to join.
Though, the average schmo just recently coming from Reddit won’t understand “Instances” or “federation”, and just give up on Lemmy as a platform overall once they see how unstable it is. lemmy.world is currently the front-door to the fediverse for a lot of people here.
I got a few new people on my instance that specifically said they wanted a smaller instance while Lemmy.world had issues.
I think there are like 1100+ instances now. No reason to hang out on the largest one unless you absolutely have to.
Once you have two or more accounts, it’s just a click in the mobile client (Jerboa, Liftoff etc) to switch profiles. Takes a second.
You will have to set up your subscriptions to communities again though on a new account. That can be annoying but kind of worth it.
My list of blocked porn communities is more than double my list of subscribed communities; reblocking would be the biggest pill.
I’ve used Lemmy Account Settings Instance Migrator, which migrates your blocked communities and settings as well as your subscriptions. It worked for me, but YMMV as the developer says it’s alpha software.
That’s been one of the biggest drawbacks for me personally. Who wants to go through collecting all of these communities, just to have the server crash and be forced to re-collect on a different instance? It’s very cumbersome, right now, and I hope that eventually it can be a bit more seamless somehow.
There are tools available to migrate accounts, like this one for example: https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
But it has some limitations like your private messages will not be transferred. Also, I never tried this so don’t complain to me if something goes wrong :)
