There are many lemmy instances in the world, but currently most people are using lemmy.world. This is why everything has gotten so slow.
You don’t have to delete your lemmy.world account, but check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map it’s a geo-based map of lemmy instances – explore stuff nearest you, pick one, sign up, search , subscribe and begin interacting with your favorite communities. It’s easy, free and it will be faster. Try it!
An export/import for “subscribed” communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.
I am planning on moving to lemmy.blahaj.zone soon-ish but I have 2 questions.
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How do I move to another instance?
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Can I move freely? For example, could I switch to lemmy.blahaj.zone to lemmy.world to kbin.social every day? I don;t like the idea of being “tied down” to an instance for a long time.
As far as I know, account migration from one instance to another is currently not possible on kbin/lemmy but with the sudden influx of users and developers I believe it is on the roadmap for at least kbin and likely lemmy too. For now you’ll have to use multiple accounts, but eventually you should be able to migrate if you choose to.
I may wait until that becomes possible, although if the wait is long, I’ll make a new account.
Yeah do whatever you decide is best! No right way to do it. Some have suggested just considering accounts temporary as we all experiment with what works best until more features are rolled out. But I know I’m already attached to my existing accounts and reluctant to make more.
Wouldn’t this put me at risk of that smaller instance defederizing and removing everything I contribute while logged in to that instance?
This is whats kind of not clear to me. While its clear what the benefit is for lemmy.world or some instance you move from, its less clear what the benefit for the individual moving is such as myself. I have more risk, its a hassle, the smaller server might itself get overloaded or break. Sometimes it feels ‘safer in numbers’. Unsure. Feels like I would be best off if everyone else moved and took on the risk while I stayed and reaped the benefits of them reducing the load rather than me doing it.
Someone explained it a little better in another post. It will not erase my content. So if I’m logged in under my lemm.ee account but post on a lemmy.world instance. If for some reason lemm.ee got defederized, my post or comments would still be there at lemmy.world I would just not be able to use my lemm.ee account going forward.
It seems like this is the way to go like OP says
Yeah. This is all I see: Software: Lemmy Signups: no
As long as this tool includes people’s personal instances, it’s useless.
“Signups: no” can also just mean that your sign-up will be checked manually, like on older instances like beehaw and sopuli
I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.
Lemmy.world has only existed for a month. Why the confidence that it’s here to stay?
It’s run through the Open Collective, and is also run by Ruud who runs one of the larger Mastodon instances as well as some other stuff on the Fediverse I believe. They’re a fairly trusted actor in the space and I think pretty transparent with everything they do which is probably another reason many people flocked there.
I’m a little confused by your comment. What function does Open Collective serve other than simply as a fiscal host?
There is a very large range between tiny instance that can disappear overnight and “large instance”. The large instances are actually more likely to disappear as their hosting costs are beyond what a small group of admins can pay out of their own pocket easily, so they vitally depend on donations and that can break down easily for many reasons.
I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven’t seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I’m wrong).
There were certainly some that had to close registrations as their donation base was insufficient for the number of users trying to sign up. And others were sold to very questionable companies as they couldn’t finance themselves otherwise.
But that wasn’t my argument. We are talking about things that can go wrong with instances. Just because you didn’t see any large instances go down in this “nice weather” period, doesn’t mean they are resilient to serious shocks.
A small to medium sized instance that is basically run as a hobby by a few admins and is optimized for being cheap enough to not need donations is the much more sustainable and resilient instance.