I just realized that none of the comments or posts I made in the last week from my instance are getting to lemmy.world.
I went to see if I my instance was defederated. No, still showing as connected.
I then went to see if I got blocked or banned. Nope, my username is not showing up in the modlog anywhere.
Is it because my instance is small? I guess not, because I can interact with people and communities from anywhere else just fine.
At the moment, the only plausible explanation I have is that lemmy.world is overwhelmed and dropping messages from smaller instances. They do however everything in their power to keep more users coming up.
Yeah, I get that they were being attacked. I can only imagine that getting DDOS'd is not fun, and worrying about the Schmoes on the smaller instances is not a top concern.
But even in the middle of these constant outages and attacks, the lemmy.world admins are still keeping registrations open? Why? Wouldn't it be better if they encouraged the users to move out of the instance to reduce the load? Isn't the whole point of decentralized technologies to be, you know, decentralized?
I shouldn't have to come here, create an account and make things even more centralized just so that I can tell people that this attitude is hurting the fediverse.
I wouldn't be so pissed at this if it weren't for the fact that some many communities were created here and is making this particular instance a crucial part of the fediverse, but the admins seems to be more worried about getting their user count up than the health of the overall system.
Please, admins, the more you go with this unstable federation and open registrations, the more of an incentive you are creating to centralize this further here. Help the fediverse and help yourselves. Close down registrations and focus on ensuring that everyone can access the communities that are being formed here.
A general thought about centralisation on the fediverse ...
Across various platforms, relatively large instances appear to be a common, arguably "natural" phenomenon.
mastodon.social,firefish.social,kbin.social,lemmy.world,pixelfed.socialetc (see the fedidb page for platforms for data).So, without judging it as inherently good or bad for the fediverse, it might be worth understanding why/how this comes to be. In that vein, my immediate thoughts:
If excessive centralisation is to be avoided, whatever the threshold is, I'd bet accounting for these factors (and whatever others are in play) would be necessary. Some random thoughts along these lines:
Beyond all of that, it might be worth considering the benefits of a relatively big "central" instance. Namely, AFAIU, that they test the limits of the software, which is useful for future growth, they can probably muster larger moderation teams, though such often has scaling issues, and, to be fair, provide the easy landing spot for newcomers who don't know how (or why) to pick an instance.
Just spitballing an idea I haven't fully thought out: One interesting way to avoid excessive centralization may be to display a "Join lemmy" button to logged-out users, more prominent than the "Register" button, which redirects to join-lemmy.org/instances instead of the instance registration page. Though I agree with your point about join-lemmy in its current form being somewhat underwhelming as an onboarder. In addition to what you mentioned it could do with some filters (For language, at a minimum) and sorting (For instance age, size). Even adding a button that basically says "I understand the instance I pick isn't that important, just send me to a random reliable one please" would help a lot.
In the long term I also hope Lemmy evolves to actually make the instance you're on matter less - for example, by changing defaults on the homepage and search page to "All" instead of "Local", showing global subscriber count instead of instance subscriber count when searching communities, adding ways to migrate accounts and communities between instances, and perhaps even adding a way to merge one instance into another if one admin no longer wants to maintain their instance, and another admin is willing to absorb them.
That is now a viable option since join-lemmy has finally updated with more instances. Before it was the same 6..
I feel like picking your first instance is not as important as you make it out to be here.
It's similar to registering on a web site, and all these decisions you talk about sound like you are choosing a partner for life. Is she responsible? Will she take care of the children?
It really isn't the end of the world if you pick a small instance and you don't like it, I promise.
So I'm going to push back against your response here pretty hard.
First, I'm not talking about myself, I'm trying to understand general user behaviour ... so going ad hominem here or presuming I'm projecting my own problems isn't productive or useful.
Second ... "it isn't that hard" is, IMO, the mantra of someone choosing not to understand the users, which can become a pretty toxic behaviour or perspective.
You state ...
(emphasis mine)
The pertinent questions here are:
If you were trying to help me ... thanks ... but I wasn't talking about me ... rather the generic "new user".
And none of what you say about it being
not as importantdoesn't really alter the reality that the friction of decentralisation makes (re-)centralisation around a big instance the path of least resistance and therefore the common choice for many newcomers.There are tools out to help you (at least partly) migrate your account. It won't migrate your posts and comments but it will migrate your subscriptions.
https://github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate
Also !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world is working on implementing this feature.
Yeah i know, I think it's very good that it's coming in the clients soon. Us technical folks can run command line utilities for this but probably a few users would run into issues with those.
Yeah it's command line and python so definitely not suited for everyone. It's why I point out that the Sync dev is working in it. All of it is just growing pains..
lol your instance is considered "Compromised" from totalvirus and malwarebytes.
Can you send me a link? That sounds weird. :)
Your post made me curious so I scanned it with a number of tools:
https://www.urlvoid.com/scan/lemmy.today/
https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search?url=lemmy.today
https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/lemmy.today
Looks fine?
The first url says directly Found: 1 from fortinet. Could be false positive. But still weird.
Hmm it didn't a minute ago.
That's weird. Probably a false positive but will ask the instance owner.
They could probably ask them to remove the false positive.
If I had to guess, they saw exploding-heads.com and flagged it or something. One user from there posted comments on lemmy.today where he had that link. And that instance seems blocked by lemmy.world and others.
Some other guy said they are trolls but I don't know anything about them.
Im the instance owner of lemmy.today. I contacted fortinet about this and will share their response when it comes.
The instance is running latest version of the default lemmy software on a rented server by Hetzner, so Im very curious what they say about this. There is nothing else on it. :)
Could be that the IP you are using was used for something else before.. Before it was thrown back in the pool and assigned to you.
LW is also hosted at Hetzner btw.
Could be but there was a button at the top of the scanning site where I could push to make a fresh scan. And still it shows up as phishing.
Very mysterious but it will be interesting to find out why...
I'm glad LW is hosted there too, it's a good service and really good customer service as well.
Yes I have been using Hetzner for over 20 years so I was happy to find out Ruud chose them for LW too :)
Well everyone else is extreamly overpriced. I work with cloud environments as part of my job, and its silly the amount of money being spent on AWS.
"Pay for what you use" is more like "pay us for every little thing that would be free if you owned the server".
I joined vlemmy and subscribed to a bunch of communities. What communities was I subscribed to? I'll never know because it's down forever
Doesn't sound like a huge personal loss to me but sure... You would have to resub to stuff that interests you. :)
I suggested this in another thread. However I've come to see an issue with that idea. The users.
It's very hard to change the URL of an instance for federation purposes. All the existing posts and comments that exist everywhere will reference the original URLs.
My suggestion was to move the user side to a new URL. But, the problem there is that lemmy.world is one of the main instances that are suggested to potential fediverse denizens. I suppose the user based URLs could redirect to a new lemmy user only instance keeping the original federating.
It would make some difference in terms of load because the one central point both federation and user activity is going to hit is the SQL server. The user side would be just one more instance pulling data from the federating site. And all user activity would hit the new dedicated DB. There's still going to be an upper limit without moving toward clustered SQL servers and the like.
I think there's a real problem with advertising the fediverse on places like reddit. Because, in one post you'll never properly explain the fediverse. It's a bit like the Matrix. You need to see it for yourself. As such, what would seem like the sensible thing to do (point people to fedidb or the observer one) will likely confuse people initially. Pointing them to lemmy.world or kbin.social makes sense for this reason, get engaged and understand later. So, I'm not sure how the long term solution to this goes.