I first used lemmy on lemmy.world but due to its size I had several issues of things just not loading and needing a full page refresh. So I tried to set up my own instance and it works mostly but the federation aspect is leaving me with a few questions.
Will remote communities only sync new posts from when I subscribed or will past posts show up eventually?
Is having a single user instance realistic or should I try find another small instance?
You can see posts from the past, but not comments.
Posts will make their way over when someone interacts with it (comments/votes on it). I think old comments may make their way over under the same conditions. Old votes will not make their way over.
You can search for a post or comment to force your instance to load it (copy the federation link, the rainbow-web-looking icon) just like you would do for communities.
I’m running a very small instance and I highly recommend using LCS:
https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs
Essentially it automatically subscribes to popular communities from other instances on behalf of a user within your instance. That way, when you want to subscribe to a community at some point, it’s quite likely that it will already be full of comments already.
How can I make it subscribe, to every community, on every instance, every day?
You can’t, but you can provide a list of instances and then tell it to subscribe to the top X communities in TopDay, Hot, Active, etc.
But if everyone does that it will creates a positive feedback cycle where the most popular get more exposure get more popular while the rest gets ignored.
Looks great, but would this take up a lot of storage? I’m currently running my instance on an oracle free tier micro instance and the storage is 47GB.
So far, not really. Only a few gigs so far, but it’s hard to predict how big it could get.
By the way, Oracle free tier has 200GB of storage for ARM64 systems.
Ruud, who runs lemmy.world, was asked how much the instance is using, see here: https://lemmy.world/comment/784410
Basically 30G DB and 60G pictrs for the whole instance for 4 weeks of usage.
They have 13k communities and 22k active users per month.
I first used lemmy on lemmy.world but due to its size I had several issues of things just not loading and needing a full page refresh.
A lot of us did this, but now the big servers like lemmy.world are having to send every vote, comment, post to a huge number of servers and it results in unreliable delivery due to the servers being overloaded. There are 10 second timeouts in the HTTP connection between servers and the retry attempts are limited (and in their desperation to keep the severs from being even slower they are reducing retries).
The federation protocols have too much overhead, I don’t see how this will work. I’ve been suggesting that Lemmy to Lemmy replication of comment/post/votes not even use federation and bulk download via polling the front-end API and even some new API calls intended for server to server message sync. An entirely new system.
Is having a single user instance realistic or should I try find another small instance?
You would be helping the Lemmy overload problems of servers like lemmy.world to not run your own instance and get on another small one that’s already getting most of the content already.
