What would be the best thing to do to help keep lemmy.world up? Donate? Servers? What is the best way to help?
Best I can do is upload memes and add to the load.
That’s actually not a terrible idea. Lemmy really needs content. It doesn’t necessarily matter what that content is, it Is just really starving for activity in general. So anything that you post is a huge help.
Lemmy needs content. Lemmy.world needs resources or even just for people to spread out into other instances. It’s the fediverse after all. You don’t even need to have or use Lemmy to enjoy Lemmy content.
Move to a different instance to spread the load. You can see all the same content from any other instance, but the experience will be a lot better with less lag.
Lemmy is not the same as lemmy.world.
The problem with lemmy.ml and lemmy.world is that they are just too popular and instances don’t scale well.
I don’t understand how a million tiny instances is supposed to scale better than a few big instances.
Caching all the data from another instance is overhead. If you’re not serving that to enough people, your instance is going to create more traffic than it reduces.
1-10 person instances can’t possibly help. Maybe 10,000 users on an instance is valuable for scaling.
I would indeed say 1000-5000 users instance should be the soft spot. Having a look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and filter by 1m (monthly active users) shows that 27k are on Lemmy.world, while Lemmy.ml is second with only 3,8k.
A healthier solution would be to have all the small instances (imagine the 25 biggest, so up to Lemmy.zip) to gain users, so that LW would be less critical
Is there any functional difference between 4 people funding and running 1 instances vs 4 people funding and running 4 instances?
Scale that to a few millions on 1 instances and you get Reddit, so there is at least a difference in terms of decision making
Their ALL feeds will only have their individual servers unless their users go to the other instances and subscribe to communities. And only the communities they subscribe to will be fetched. But they’ll be fetched for all users on your instance with only one sub.
(Technically they’re pushed and not fetched.)
Each instance only downloads relieve content to its users. An instance with a popular community will have to handle all the posts made to that community, which will still be much smaller than all of them. While the overall load might be higher, the load on any given instance will be lower.
Images, by far the biggest bandwidth user, are directly transfered from posting instance to client and are not federated. Having more instances will spread out that load very effectively.
You can see all the same content from any other instance
Nah. I moved from ml to world to .ca, and .ca is the best. I didn’t realize how much content ml and world defederated from. I love it on .ca
Helpful trick, if you go to [any instance url]/instances (for example https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances ) it will show all the instances it is federated and defederated with. (Use your browser’s find in page feature to scroll down to the “blocked instances” section)
Two things I can see, needs to be on scalable infrastructure rather than a few hosts running docker-compose. Needs to have support for in-memory key/value stores for caching. Either of these would probably help out a bit. Donate to the developers or instance maintainer and either could happen.
What exactly is the issue bringing lemmy.world down that these two things would address?
Too many users, the Lemmy instance software is not very fast.
Here is a (few weeks old) chart of users by instance:
Interesting! I wasn’t aware that .world was so popular.
Fantastic. Where do I do any of that?
Digging around… Here’s to donate to the .world federation. https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld?utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan
See the heart symbol in the top bar
That goes directly to the developers of Lemmy, not the lemmy.world instance admins (just making the distinction).
It goes to whatever your instance admins set it to. In lemmy.world’s case, I guess they chose to stick with the default.
Honestly, everyone not joining lemmy.world would help. Also, not confusing Lemmy and lemmy.world as the same thing. If you have an alt account on another server, consider making it your permanent account. It’s the fediverse. You don’t need to be on lemmy.world to see lemmy.world.
Honestly having a list of what makes instances different would help. I have two lemmy accounts right now and figuring out which instance to pick after Limmy.world is tough.
And I only want maximum federation. I’m willing to do my own moderation and curation, just not hosting. Though that may come later if needed.
Imo, the main difference between instances are the admin’s attitudes.
Beehaw.com wants to be walled off for curation, lemmy.ml is a general server for tankies that don’t want to troll and serves as a test bed for the devs, lemmy.world wants to be a general hub, sh.itjust.works also wants to be a general hub that puts more value on letting people manage their own content
Yeah, I originally made an account in like early June in Lemmy.world then I made this account recently to not add to the load. Haven’t touch other account ever since.
Easy migration. Migrating account post history or migrating community from one to another easily
I’ve heard that post migration is a big task, every instance has to re-appoint the posts to the new one. I’d love to have the feature though.
It’d probably also help comply with GDPR removal requests
I’ve been creating accounts on other servers as well so that I can protect the username and also have a certain amount of per acct specializations.
If I create an account on a small instance and that instance shuts down, will I not lose my account and post history?
deleted by creator
The cost quickly adds up for small underfunded projects though. You also need to factor in how the application does scale. What kind of ingress/load balancing is required. What kind of stateful storage is required. Network policy. Resource monitoring. Config management, CI/CD pipeline. I setup a basic cluster on gke to start but haven’t gotten around to building these just yet. I’ve got a goal of attempting the most performant, scalable, and cheapest instance out there.
That’s the easy part. Next part is identifying which app endpoints are the most intensive and splitting them off into separate deployments.
The hard part is scaling the database, as I’ve only seen one tool that can autoshard effectively, but it’s for MySQL, not Postgres.
Ribbit
Have any instances considered taking money for running advertisements? I don’t mean the type where they are shoved between posts or following you down the page with flashing animated gifs, but subtle banners that may appear at the top or the side of the page.
