Does it actually matter?
Lemmy.world because lemmy.ML recommended it when I tried to sign up there. I’m considering moving to a smaller server though since this one seems to be getting overloaded.
Yea, for whatever reason, lemmy.world became the sort of de facto “main” instance, which isn’t a bad thing and lemmy.world isn’t a bad choice at all, ruud AFAICT is a dedicated and experienced fediverse admin.
There may be issues to centralising the user load too much. I don’t have the technical knowledge to back this up, but it probably makes sense that there is such a thing as too much for one server to handle. If it has to handle all of the user requests as well has syncing all of the large and popular communities that a “main” instance is likely to host, then it’s just a lot and probably requires technical solutions and investment beyond what one admin/team is willing or capable of doing. Plus, lemmy the software may not be designed for that sort of load, which probably requires a distinct architecture from that of a smaller instance.
So it probably, at point at least, makes sense to spread the load of both the users and the communities. However, it seems that redditors as accustomed to a “central” and singular service as they are have kind of opted in to re-creating a central “main” instance like they’re used to. It may very well be a bad habit, as it presumes that there’s just some giant server and a dedicated tech team sitting there waiting to scale up at a moment’s notice. Of course, lemmy.world are free to halt sign ups and encourage users to pick other instances. But it remains to be seen how lemmy, its software and the fediverse/threadiverse in general handles communities/groups/magazines at this new scale.
In the mean time, intentionally spreading the load might help. As would donating to the developers and your admin!!
I have the technical knowledge to back it up, and I confirm your understanding is spot on.
Thanks!
Can we pick your brain on this?
For a big instance getting an over-sized user base … roughly how many would that be and what could the instance do about it? I’d imagine a number of infrastructural things could be done before the core lemmy code base and design needs to be substantially changed or redesigned. Big separate database service, big beefy primary server/instance or even a cluster like kubernetes (which is what mastodon.social use AFAIK).
As for the alternative where many users are distributed more even across many instances, how well would that or can that scale with all of the community data that would need to be synced up between all the instances? From what I’ve gathered, it’s precise this kind of work that’s plagued lemmy.world somewhat and caused some of the issues that users have been having, largely, it seems, from the server being overloaded with “federation workers” timing out.
Yeah I’ve noticed some issues lately with lemmy.world. I assume it has to do the quick growth from the great Reddit migration.
I chose lemm.ee because:
- Its admin @sunaurus@lemm.ee has been working hard at improving the instance’s performance and fixing issues.
- It has been relatively smooth and performant since the infrastructure upgrade.
- The domain name is cleverly satisfying.
Did you know that .ee is the Estonian tld? Estonia in Estonian is Eesti. Sunaurus is from Estonia and runs the c/Eesti community. The Estonian language is one of the few living relatives of the Finnish language (a member of the Finnic language family).
Yes. I realy enjoyed this instance so far. I joined during the black out protest and first looked at lemmy.me, but they said they had performance issues and didn’t realy want any new sign ups. Just scrolled for a bit and stumbled upon lemm.ee, with a beautiful welcome message and another massage how he upgraded the servers. Just new this was the way to go. Such a nice owner, who actually cares how our experience on this platform is.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.
Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad as well as tech.de (or something similar) I might host myself sometime later. I was on mastodont a while before , went back and tired of proprietary again. This time I am thoroughly fed up and will stay.
For me federation is good. I see the problem with filterbubbles but I’m to old for this shit. I rather be in my bubble.