Lemmy

IMHO, selecting an instance is definitely the biggest user experience problem Lemmy has at the moment. New users who are unfamiliar with the platform are going to pick the biggest instances, and that's going to create performance problems.

We'll need to prioritize work on instance browsing. Lemmy has outgrown the experience over at join-lemmy.org. If I could wave a magic wand, instance browsing and onboarding would have a way to show instance capacity / performance, a way to categorize and filter instances, and a way to recommend instances based upon interests. That would probably help to spread people out more evenly.

I would be happy to use another instance but my account is on this one. Is there a way to migrate an account, or perhaps "link" accounts on multiple instances somehow?

You might wanna consider temporarily closing sign-up requests on lemmy.ml similarly to how mastodon.social did it during its large influx. Making a sign-up request and just receiving an infinite loading icon is a very frustrating experience.

Similarly, you want to make it as easy as possible to financially contribute to lemmy, even if it means using proprietary platforms like Patreon.

Overall, the current Reddit API change is probably one of the largest opportunities for lemmy right now, so smoothing over the user experience as fast as possible in the coming days will be of atmost importance if we want lemmy to become a viable Reddit alternative...

Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements

How/which URL should we link to then? Now is the best time to get users to switch to Lemmy so we need to make it as newbie friendly as possible. Already the application process has put off some people (I do like that bit though, keeps away the low effort folks). Thanks.

If this is the Mastodon moment, ho boy. Don't envy the sysadmins.

I know I'm being a bit pushy at this point, but distributing instance load can be helped in some part by merging this PR and deploying the latest changes (including more languages and recommended instances as well) :)

I guess it’s good news that a lot of people are migrating from other sites like me

@ devs:

Can you please focus your work on optimising performance for the UI? It will greatly reduce the amount of electricity and money spent, so you're actually multiplying every tenth of a second you can shave off of CPU time...

Thank you a lot for writing this software. It's been a great little project so far and it seems to go down the Mastodon route of increased popularity. Be proud!

lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.

Beehaw has a concerning financial post at the top of their frontpage that may indicate they might struggle too when the massive wave of Reddit exodus occurs.

I guess I have to figure out what instances to suggest to people. I do find that direct instance suggestions is the way to go, so I guess I gotta write up a list.

Ideally, some pre-existing communities on Reddit would create their own instances similar to how often they have their own Discords, and have large amounts of users migrate that way. But there's a huge, wide, amount of technical difference between those two things. You can't exactly easily find capable Lemmy admins.

Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?

I run a general purpose, (currently) single-user instance as of yesterday. It will be funded through end of 2023 and then I'll probably beg for donations if I host other users. https://links.dartboard.social

This is hosted on Digital Ocean and I can scale up CPU/RAM/Storage/Bandwidth as needed. (I already did once)

I like to call Lemmy "Feddit".

Saldy it's very common to have this influx towards the "main server" as people that are not used to the federated aspect come to the platform.

Either way, it would be interesting to collect this information and later post some metrics about the exodus from Reddit, kind of like how Fosstodon and other Mastodon instances did when Twitter had their issues.