this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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It was always going to happen but an instance being the defacto default for Lemmy is a bad thing.
There really needs to be a tool to help people pick an instance, but even then people would just flock to the general instances like .world anyway
Myself and another developer are working on something we think will solve this:
OP: https://lemm.ee/post/2800726 TLDR: Automatic User Distribution
Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:
Does it take into account instance rules like language, moderation, or whether it's a personal instance hosted on a raspi that may go down at any moment?
Yes! Lemmy.world (or any other big server) must manually add the-other-server to their "recommder" list. So the-other-server has to prove to Lemmy.world that they're going to offer similar reliability.
Would also be cool to have like a short questionnaire, like picking your class in Morrowind, but instead you end up on a German industrial metal music instance.
People are talking about capacity because they clearly don't understand what's really happening here, they think that it's Reddit's hug of death (that too many users are causing the site to go over capacity) when in reality it's an attack, these outages are being caused by attackers intentionally not by a swarm of people unintentionally.
I agree capacity isn't the cause of outages. Centralization is an issue, and capacity is a way for a server like Lemmy.world to say "I would prefer less new users"
Agreed, in my original post I mentioned posts per day as a metric thats slightly closer to actual load. But its pretty hard to throttle number of posts, so I think users is going to be a more useful value.
If a server has really active users they can set a lower target number of users.
Eventually it would be nice to have a standardized way of migrating and backing up accounts to make it possible for one server to offload its existing users to another server.
I also think instances just need to have more sane urls. It sounds silly but like it or not branding does matter. Instances like beehaw and sh.itjust.works just rub me the wrong way during first impressions. Even some of my friends who I've tried to introduce to Lemmy are just like..."what the fuck kinda website are you making me go to?" I am not surprised that lemmy.world is big, partly because the URL actually sounds official.
We also need super-communities that pull in content from multiple communities/instances, better multi-instance search, and a way to migrate between instances before the masses will be okay with smaller instances.
Views that show you multiple communities would be great. Let me see both major Steam Deck communities in one view.
Sound like you should join the dev team as an idea person, I support you
They're pretty descriptive: do you want a place to "behave", or would you rather fling shit at each other?
This isn't Reddit, you get to pick your experience. Can even sign up to more than one instance, each with different rules!
Apps do that, including some web app.
Search and migrations could be improved, though.
I don't just mean grouping communities client side though. I mean super-communities that a mod or admin can curate and that other people can share and subscribe to. Out of curiosity, which apps have you been using that have this feature?
It makes sense that general purpose instances would have the most users. I'm not a programmer so while I could still register there why would I pick programmer.dev?
The bigger issue I had in picking an instance was just in understanding the differences. I think it would help if instances advertised their stance on defederation, moderation, etc... to help people make a decision (or even to see that lemmy.world may be more similar to some other instances than they might think).
multiple accounts, one macro, one micro, works wonders. i like my lemm.ee account more but lemmy.world was my gateway as it was the one advertised to me
I already do have multiple accounts, but I usually don't use the others because I worry that I'm going to accidentally upvote things twice. Would be nice if Lemmy had a feature to exclude duplicate votes from your other accounts.
Indeed, and it seems like it's down again
Uhh, jeepers I'm on my NSFW account because my main lemmy account is on lemmy.world. Hamburgers.
I'm not going to pretend to understand the technical details, but would it make more sense if Instances were treated more like subreddits? So instead of the main Lemmy.world instance, we'd have gaming.world, news.world, nsfw.world, woodworking.world, and so on. So then things would be distributed more evenly across the fediverse and it would be harder for a single for a DDOS attack to take out the entire system all at once? Or does the architecture of the whole thing not make any sense doing it like that? Would each instance then have to setup their own server or something to make it work?
I guess the community names could be subdomains, the default config would pass all the subdomains to the same Lemmy process. But this would make it easier to split things up down the road, and you could move some of those sub domains to different servers entirely.
Not sure if it's worth rearchitecting things like this now, probably better to just close signups and disallow creating new communities on overloaded instances like lemmy.world
Each instance is it's own server, then it has many communities which are created by users. Ideally we spread the communities across instances, but unfortunately most of the big communities are clustered on the big instances, because finding communities on small instances is hard.