Fediverse

One of the great things about lemmy.world's insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there's now real world production systems providing that opportunity.

The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.

I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.

I think no.

I'm having the same issues with pages not loading as everybody else - but this is a critical moment for Lemmy. A site like this only works if it has a lot of users - the more signups the better.

I understand that new users can sign up for other instances, and still see and interact with lemmy.world content - but I think adding any barrier to entry at all will potentially discourage a huge number of new users. As a rule, new users have no idea how lemmy, federation, instances, etc work - and telling them they can't sign up and to consider another instance will probably end with a lot of them just giving up and sticking to reddit.

The server issues will pass, but stunting our growth at such a critical stage might not. It's bad enough that beehaw defederated at a time like this.

I'm in favor of simplifying the signup process with auto-assigning an instance. [Edit: For users coming from https://join-lemmy.org/]

For people who start using the fediverse or lemmy, the concept of federated instances is hard to understand. It also does not matter that much at this part of their journey. How about randomly assigning new users to instances which are open? This could also help with load balancing between instances.

The idea is to make entry as quick and easy as possible. Once users familiarized themselves with content and communities, they can reevaluate their 'decision' which instance they want to make their home. At this point, they have a better idea what this is all about.

Choosing an instance right from the start should still be possible, just not be the default mode. Make it a small link at the bottom 'advanced mode' or whatever, just don't scare or burden newcomers with unecessary complexity.

To answer the question directly: I think each instance can make that decision for themselves, and open or close registration accordingly. Both is fine.

It makes sense to pause registrations if an instance is actively overloaded, but there’s no reason it can’t keep growing if more hardware is added and the performance issues are resolved.

I get the point, but that limits the users' right to select which community they want to join. I feel that is more important than preemptive decentralization of content. Hopefully there is a way to migrate communities from one instance to another. Should an instance get too large that would be a good feature to mitigate risk.

Depends on server loads and scaling.

If the engineer(s) and admin(s) running things can handle the costs associated with growth then I think it should stay open. However at a certain point the load on the infrastructure, sysadmins, and cost make that untenable.

It’s not cheap to run this kind of stuff. I know that first hand because of my career running HPC clusters and running them in cloud environments.

I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what this must be costing and I’m really thankful that someone is putting in the thankless labor of love. That’s why I canceled my Reddit premium and started donating to this instance to help with that in some way. The only other way I could help is donating my time & experience. But I think they need money more than engineers lol

The TL;DR is that if we want to keep these things online we need to donate money (and/or time/labor).

It’s already laggy and unstable. Maybe more hardware and improved software will help, but it might just be hard for lemmy to grow.

If the hint and instructions are clearly visible then it sounds like a great idea.

I think apps should contain the ability to create an account, and select a server at which that account is created. Maybe they could sort the servers by distance depending on country or something.

Yes. Encourage people to use federation FFS.

Personally I registered in lemmy.world not knowing any better. I would migrate my account to another instance in a heartbeat if it was possible.

Making it difficult for people to abandon reddit and join lemmy at THIS stage would be a bad idea. I think it has to scale.

Eventually if it successfully catches on and becomes the popular option, maybe. But even then I think I’d prefer a (or several) round-robin type options for joining. I think the server names are too exposed in lemmy to be easily understood by the masses. Like I get it but I’m a 20 year dev. Not a person in my family understands.

No

I don't think it's necessarily worth it to close, as others have pointed out it's a great real-world stress test for the software.

I DO think it's very much worth having some info on the signup page to let people know

• they're welcome to join but the server is currently overloaded and experiencing performance issues

• they don't need to sign up there to access the content

and of course

• where to go instead

Then everyone is informed and can make up their own mind instead of blindly signing up and assuming this is just what Lemmy is like.

At the early stages no. It is vital we keep it open to get as many people through the door to promote fediverse. Eventually some people will create accounts in other instances.

I do think there should be a hard limit to the number of total users in an instance. Otherwise as you said the content will get centralised in a specific instance. But that limit should be much higher than what lemmy.world now has. Also closing new registration at this time would be detrimental to the overall ecosystem. This is just my personal opinion.

No because we want people there more than on Reddit.

Maybe it would be a good idea to put up a request for people to register elsewhere, but honestly, where? Randos naturally gravitate to large servers so if the largest one closes, it gets confusing unless there's one that is ready as a direct replacement.

Would there be any benefit to lemmy.world admins running a lemmy2.world and redirecting new users to sign up there? It would spread the load and federation between the two should be easier due to proximity and having the same admins.

Probably not. I understand the concern, but another issue is sending people to smaller instances which may end up disappearing. It's all run by small groups of volunteers or even by individuals, at least on the bigger servers you have, at least in theory, a lower chance of the instance vanishing (with your account).

I don't know if there are any plans to cooperate between instances for tech support/funding or if accounts can be transfered one day. Until then - a slow lemmy.world feels like the lesser evil.

I think strategic, times windows where sign ups are paused, in order to help distribute users, might be necessary. I don't think that's optimal for user experience, but I feel like if volume of sign ups stays where it is, that it's probably needed.

I'm not sure. But maybe it makes sense to sign up to more than one instance.

My main account is on lemmy.world, but now I've signed up to another one on aussie.zone. I can see all the content from there and it's nice and fast unlike world at the moment.

It feels kind of like I'm experiencing a benefit of federation, when I can simply switch accounts and keep browsing when things slow down on one instance.