2y ago

Spread Out: How To Speed Up Lemmy

lemmy.fediverse.observer

Fediverse Observer

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!

wolny internet @szmer.info

harc @szmer.info

2y ago

Mapa lokalizacji serwerów Lemmiego

lemmy.fediverse.observer /map

Fediverse @lemmy.ml

const_void @lemmy.ml

2y ago

Map of Lemmy server locations

lemmy.fediverse.observer /map

122 comments

An export/import for "subscribed" communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.
- Theres a userscript. Check at !plugins@sh.itjust.works
  
  Can you link the post? I’m not able to find it.
- There needs to be a "MigrationPub" spec to export your info to be ready to import into another user login.
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
  
  Yeah they really need to update that binary presentation. Our instance says no registrations, but we do have them open, you just gotta pass the requirements: email, sign up question and captcha.
I am planning on moving to lemmy.blahaj.zone soon-ish but I have 2 questions.
How do I move to another instance?
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.
- you can have accounts on multiple instances, go ahead and sign up. your info is NOT transferred, so you'll need to re-subscribe to your communities, and your posts stay on the instance you wrote them from.
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.
- 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).
- Mine has existed for a few years now, so I'm fairly confident it'll exist for more
- Nice! I just got my personal instance up and running so I may give this a shot.
- Been using this for a few days now, extremely useful, much better than searching all over like I was before lol. Thanks for your work!
- That's immensely useful, thanks! Running it on my own public 1.18.1 instance with no issues.
Really good advice.
The more we decentralize, the less any one server needs to pull all the load.
The only instance in my country has "cult" as the 1st word in its name.
- Philippenis moments
- I suppose it’s not the Cult of the dead cow..?
- Sounds like a good time
If someone's looking for an instance, feel free to use mine, lemmings.world. As a bonus, you can call yourself a lemming! It's hosted in Germany.
- Thank you! I have taken you up on your offer. 😊
  
  Yay, welcome among Lemmings!
So can I just start running my only instance on my home server and just let only a few friends use it, then federate with the rest?
- The only "downside" from running your own instance is the all page is generated from all the communities that someone in your instance has visited. So with a smaller instance the all page is less diverse.
  
  There's a toggle to swap the all page to include all federated instances, truly all
- absolutely, talk to !selfhosted@lemmy.world
- Yup, if you're lazy you can use this to set it up: https://github.com/ubergeek77/Lemmy-Easy-Deploy
- Absolutely
I tried to migrate to another instance by rejoining the same communities as this account. However I can't seem to find some of the communities anymore through the other instance's search page. There's no indication that there's any defederation going on.
I still have no idea what a proper community joining process is. I just go to the search page, type it in and scroll through the random comments until I find a link to a community.
If only I could just copy the community link, right now it'll just open up with lemmy.world again, so I have to go through the other instance's search page. Please let me know if there's a guide of any kind.
- Community discovery on Lemmy so far feels incredibly difficult. Even browsing "all" I feel I get the same 10-15 communities in rotation.
  How am I supposed to find the medium-sized communities about specific subjects that don't end up on "all?"
  
  How am I supposed to find the medium-sized communities about specific subjects that don’t end up on “all?”
  Search by keyword:
  https://lemmyverse.net/communities
  https://browse.toast.ooo/communities
  https://browse.feddit.de/
  https://lemmies.blue42.net/
  Here's a curated directory: https://sub.rehab/
  You can also checkout
  /c/findacommunity@lemmy.ml
  /c/communitypromo@lemmy.ca
- As far as I understand, your instance is only aware of a community on another instance if at least one user on your instance has subscribed to that community on the other instance. Perhaps that's what you're experiencing?
  
  That's interesting.
  I'm fairly new and I'm not seeing a lot of chatter about the limitations of Lemmy / other fediverse applications.
  I don't suppose you can point me to where you learned this and/or other information on how information is shared between instances?
- I just put the url in the search box on the Lemmy webui sand search. I find a lot of the time it says nothing found but if I click search a second tinder it finds it so it must be a bug. Then click the community and subscribe.
- Community discovery on Lemmy so far feels incredibly difficult. Even browsing "all" I feel I get the same 10-15 communities in rotation.
  How am I supposed to find the medium-sized communities about specific subjects that don't end up on "all?"
I started on lemmy.world but am currently writing this from discuss.online, a lemmy instance I found in the greater NYC area because that's where I'm based. It has the same access to all the communities and content that lemmy.world does and because it's nearby and has fewer users it's fast! Signing up and setting up my subscriptions only took a few minutes. I still have a lemmy.world account, but I don't need to use it all the time.
- Hi fellow discuss.online person!
  I'm finding it has zero issues out here in Utah too. Just hoping it grows some additional communities outside of nerf for my local feed 😂
I think the concerns about smaller instances are valid (as I post from lemmus.org). Some additional data points to consider when evaluating an instance would be whether they're running a recent version and the uptime of the instance.
It'd probably be a good idea to have a page that promotes these smaller instances that 'score' well to help distribute some of the load.
lemmy.world was an instance I tried and call me an impatient spoiled brat, but it's not usable for me because it's so darn slow. It's much better to join a smaller instance. It doesn't even have to be in the country you're connecting from. sh.itjust.works is in Canada, I am in Western Europe, it's snappy AF. And less toxic btw. kbin.social is pretty awesome, though. Loads up for me nice and fast with more content I want to see. I've settled on kbin as my place to go, but there are other instances that are just as fantastic. The lesson I learned: lemmy.world might be the big general instance and it might wish to claim to be "the front page of the internet" but it's bogged down and too slow. It also wasn't fun for me when I could actually use it. You know, because of the usual. Too much bickering and too much meta stuff. It's much better to join the communities hosted on lemmy.world from another faster instance. You get snappier loading up of content and you avoid their whole home page which, at the moment, is just a meta victim.
I’m gonna guess that just being on a less busy server will make the biggest difference. I moved from lemmy world and lemm.ee is super fast even though I’m pretty sure both are across the ocean from me.
Something like this needs to be incorporated by devs at the UX onboarding level if you want success.
During mass migration times, you need to really hold new users hands to curate a path towards community ideals. Needs to be as easy as clicking boxes to attempt to create accounts on multiple instances and then app defaults to the local option to start, or something similar.
You'll only get a few crumbs here and there from dedicated people if it's that manual of a process.
I would prefer if there was a way to ping every instance to find the fastest one. Like this: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/issues/12
If you're in central Europe, feel free to join mine!
I've just discovered that kbin.social is near Wichita. Does that mean that ernest is John Rambo? 💪😎🤜
I don't understand personally why Lemmy.world isn't utilizing load balancing (specifically, horizontal load balancing). Is it due to budget concerns?
- There are challenges with horizontal scaling due to the way that Lemmy is architected. Sounds like this will be a priority for them to improve
- For all we know it's hosted in an old laptop in someone's basement right?
  
  The dev, Ruud (User Profile), who runs Lemmy.world also runs another Fediverse instance, Mastodon.world. If you go to Mastodon.World you can see their blog posts which talks about their infrastructure and Expenses.
  https://blog.mastodon.world/welcome-lemmy-world
  https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
  The VPS package they’re hosted on runs for almost $600 a month with a massive CPU, memory, and storage. I suspect now the expenses are increasing due to the massive influx of users. Now imagine Reddit's costs serving over a billion people across the planet - Multi-million dollar contracts between Reddits and other corporations, tens of thousands of full-time salary jobs of engineers and devs, etc.
  Running a Lemmy instance on an old laptop is extremely trivial. But serving Lemmy to tens of thousands of users is expensive and difficult. Lemmy will improve over time and hopefully we’ll see load balancing and horizontal scaling in the future. I’d love to see additional containers get spun up during large spikes of capacity.
Wow, I did not expect there to be servers so close to me! Thanks for sharing this
- Lemmy still feels pretty niche so I also found it surprising for me, although it probably shouldn't be, there are quite a lot and they have to be somewhere :)
I joined https://lemmy.myserv.one but I have to resubscribe to all my communities? How can you avoid this and have it automatic?
- I created this https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate to let you sync your different communities among your accounts.
  
  Interesting. Too late as I resubscribed already but maybe will help others hopefully.
  
  Damn, I wish I found this an hour ago! I just finished transferring over to blahaj.zone. I'll definitely use this in the future!
  
  Are there more detailed instructions somewhere? I learned python for like a week and not sure what to do exactly
- That's exactly what preventing me from switching to a more obscure instance. I don't want to redo my subs all over again
  
  Kind of a big drawback and not the original impression I got when told all instances are federated so its the same everywhere and doesnt matter….
  Switching might benefit lemmy.world but it was inconvenient and didnt benefit me much. The content is the same after resubbing but was a hassle. Unclear if I gained much personally doing it.
There are two things being discussed here. The first is the original suggestion of the account you'd log into and use as a server for pulling information. The other some have mentioned is the location of communities. They both share similar problems in an overloaded or defunct instance situation, but need different solutions.
For the account I think just one main thing needs developing, and that's the ability to share a profile across different logins. So you can have two or three different logins, but you have the same settings and when people interact with you they see you as the same umbrella/main account. I'm not sure how this could work outside Lemmy, like kbin or even Mastodon without being part of the protocol itself, but maybe that's a long range idea. There's also the problem of name collision since there's enough accounts now that duplication is probably a thing. The choice right now is limited to just making accounts in a few places and see if things are better/same/worse there before you get too invested with customizing your stuff.
For instances - I had seen a suggestion of having a grouping ability between different instances that wanted to share or mirror each others content, basically an automated cross-posting. This would allow multiple instances so if one has some problem, the content still exists. There's lots of caveats with that I'm sure, but one of the laments from many Redditors is the loss of resources, and that really should be a high priority to make sure that content is both preserved and available. For now the best we can do is make communities in a few places and cross-post the more important things so more people read and respond to it.
This is kinda neat. It would be awesome to be able to filter based on the attributes listed.
In FL, the only one here with signups open is not responding and has 56k members. The next closest one is the only one open in Atlanta and it's exploding heads. No thanks. Wish I had more options.
- Yeah we need a FloridaMan instance! I'll help set it up if someone else pays for it. I'm a card-carrying bearded Unix/Linux admin who knows how to exit vim 👍
  
  What would something like that cost?
- Exploding heads? I'm in GA, but also don't care about local stuff because I live in south. I just go for stuff outside that scope for a broader sense of what's going on.
- The next closest one is the only one open in Atlanta and it's exploding heads.
  yeah pass 💀💀💀
My local instance hasn't upgraded to 1.18, and it's 404-ing me when I tried to load this community in that instance. Another friction surface absent with this lemmy.world account of mine.
- You could reach out to your instance's admin, asking them where they are at with the update?

122 comments