I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.
All fine and dandy, but don’t just pick a random one close to you. Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don’t even require an email address to sign up.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn’t say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you’re behind CG-NAT you don’t get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don’t think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
The biggest issue is that you’re giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?
You don’t need to provide an email address to sign up at most of the big instances. I think lemmy.world is the exception. Even your instance lemmy.ca does not require an email address.
If you really want to provide one, you could use a service that does email forwarding. Some examples are https://simplelogin.io (owned by Proton Mail), and Firefox Relay (Owned by Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser). These both have free tiers. There is also https://duckduckgo.com/email/ from the people who make the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. That one I believe gives you unlimited new randomised email addresses for free. Very low attachment size limit but great for something like Lemmy.
Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
Close to you helps in general, it’s not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
Agreed that close helps in general but 200-300ms isn’t really that noticeable unless it’s something where latency is important. I’m also surprised that some of the larger instances aren’t using Cloudflare for caching. If things like images etc… are cached all over the world then I doubt anyone would notice any speed issues.
Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least
In order to switch instances hosted on a different server, but keep your account history such as comments, votes, posts, saved posts, etc.
Only way to switch instances right now is to make a new account from scratch on that instance.
But you can still view and interact with all content on any federated instance so why would you need another account?
Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?
For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!
I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.
The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it’s easier to search. The instances also aren’t 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.
Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community
