Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
yeah, that ama convinced me it was time to take the plunge. just created this account, first comment on lemmy lol
first comment on lemmy
From kasirate@kbin.social
Lol. There’s gonna be a lot of heads exploding when people realize what the fediverse is and how it works.
I don’t even understand, myself. ATM I have one kbin account and a few Lemmy accounts. Not sure if there is an advantage to having an account on a kbin instance vs a Lemmy instance or anything??
At the moment, Jerboa seems like the best way to browse (although nowhere near as polished as many of the bigger Reddit apps obviously), so it seems pike picking a compatible instance with that works best right now. Still, it’s all a bit overwhelming!
Just wrote a big post about Lemmy Vs kbin’s, so I don’t have to write it twice :)) https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/9489/-/comment/40195
I have no clue how to view that link on my home instance
Maybe this link works better? https://sh.itjust.works/comment/33194
yes!, i need to learn how these links work!
sadly thats sometimes a little difficult. Entering the link in the search only works if its the link from the original instance. One can geht this link by following the colerfull rainbow icon under the post (in web view).
Basically the main difference is who your admin team is. So that means different moderation styles, allowing NSFW or not, allowing downvotes, controlling which communities get made (or not), etc.
You can create communities on your home instance if your admins allow it (Lemmy.ml and Kbin do, Beehaw does not). But you have to make an account on an instance to create a community there.
It’s totally reasonable to jump between instances until you find one you like.
I’m on beehaw right now and didn’t realize creating communities was disabled. Very interesting. Thanks!
same, I created a kbin account. this is my first comment 👋
Welcome to kbin! I’ve been here about a week and the community and content is great. I hope you like it too, great choice!
Hello from Lemmy! Federation is neat.
welcome to kbin!
Welcome!
Hell yes, welcome!
Same here, this is also my first kbin comment.
Welcome to the fediverse! Have fun exploring all it has to offer!
Welcome!
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
We need to build some kind of SSO that allows Lemmy users to authenticate with the same account on any instance, but will appear as if you’re still using the instance you registered on. That way you could just login to another instance if your ‘home’ instance goes down for whatever reason.
I like the sound of this, just unsure how this would be able to authenticate an account on behalf of a home instance that’s down, in a trustworthy way.
I’m not familiar with the inner workings of Lemmy and the Fediverse, so the following is based on similar implementations I’m familiar with…
SSO implementations usually require the website the user originally registered on (home instance) to confirm the account is real and authenticate it, and in most cases a new user account is automatically created using the SSO authentication details (this would prevent the user from appearing as if they’re using their home instance).
To achieve what you want, I think we’d need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I’m not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
On the flip side, I’m pretty sure SSO with a Lemmy instance that is active could work. While it would bring a lot of benefit to less tech-savvy users, and a lot of convenience to us when we’re given a threadiverse link to another instance, from a technical perspective I think that would be a challenging implementation. Users would need to be careful about having their credentials phished on a malicious instance too
i’d also be worried that some corp would try to take control of the centralized sso mechanism and thus control the user base. imho we must avoid the instinct to centralize anything.
but potentially maybe there’s a federated directory where people could register and be assigned a server to do load balancing to key problems like lemmy.ml are experiencing (?)
To achieve what you want, I think we’d need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I’m not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
Since we’re a decentralized federated network, it would stand to reason that the SSO implementation would also be so. Maybe something built on top of DHT shared by every instance, which just stores user key hashes to verify they are who they say they are. That way there would be no issue with central authentication authority and all instances will go by the hash table for user auth.
Quick check and here’s what mastodon has been doing on the issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16221
it’s like email. You need a server somewhere to hold your inbox. They should make an easy way to migrate your user to another instance, though.
Some kind of aliasing
The ability to redirect your profile link to your new profile when you switch instances would be nice too. A sort of “inbox-forwarding” option, to continue the email metaphor.
Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless.
IMO, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Different communities have different priorities, principles, and technical requirements, and will take different approaches to controversy. Some communities are low-profile and laid back. Others are magnets for abuse and may require additional moderation, and even technical changes, like disabling image embeds (as one example) to mitigate harassment. Some are filled with avid shitposters, while others insist on the utmost degree of civility. Some have advanced requirements for operational security. Some want broad access to the network, while other would prefer a quiet corner. Some might be focused on video and require an instance that can handle the additional bandwidth and storage requirements.
Who hosts your instance is important. The jurisdiction your instance is housed in is important. If a community requires special accommodations for accessibility or other reasons, that is important. If an instance wants to go above the technical level and do things like verify users (kinda like journa.host) that makes an important distinction from your typical instance.
In the beginning, we won’t know who’s trustworthy, but this is the Internet. There will be controversies, and we will see how various admins respond to these controversies. Over time, they will gain reputations, both good and bad. It is best if somebody who already has a good reputation, like a respected mod from another community is able to operate the new home for that community.
For now, it probably doesn’t matter where you end up, but as time passes, it is good to keep an ear to the ground and see how things develop. Eventually you will find a solid niche. This is a problem even the fanciest join-xyz-fediservice website can’t really solve, but it is meaningful.
The one thing that I don’t like is that you can’t change your home instance. I signed up for Lemmy without knowing anything about it, and I mean I knew absolutely ZERO about how it works. Therefore, I just clicked on a random instance because I didn’t even know what an instance was, and I signed up. So what if I joined the wrong one for me? What if it turns out to be shit? I Guess I could just sign up for a different one with a different login, but wish there was an option to jump to a new one with your same login if you wanted to.
For now, if it turns out to be shit, you can just join a different instance. Perhaps leave a note in your old bio which directs people to your new account.
yeah agree with you here. i was explaining this concept to my other half who doesn’t understand tech but did say this approach makes a lot of sense.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.
But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
It would also be cool to be able to not have communities be locked to where they’re created or at least make them mobile.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
I think the best option to bridge the gap between nearly identical communities on different instances (and even the same instance) would be some kind of post tagging.
Say you post something on lemmy.ml/c/piracy but has to do with bittorrent or something. The original post can get a piracy and bittorrent tag that you can click on that to see all posts across instances with that tag. Kinda like hashtags and such on mastodon work, but on lemmy.
The thing about reddit clones is I think they try to be too much like reddit. The best thing about leaving reddit and starting new platforms is that they can really be anything the community wants it to be.
This is something that made me stop using Mastodon, too many instances with bad method of connecting them. I’d much prefer that instances aren’t seen to the user (I wouldn’t mind somewhere with the text “this community is hosted by X on server Y”). But seeing @username@instance is weird and many Reddit refugees won’t have any idea what does it mean. I mean, the concept of federated network is complex already.
I’ve also encountered a lot of bugs in my short time of use which I’d like to see fixed, but I’m not sure where can I report them, or to see if they are reported already.
Thanks!
Noo. Instances are responsible for moderating their users because if you have bad users all coming from one instance then you’ll get defederated, but instances will also defederate each other when drama happens.
It’ll balance out as more instances start up. I also joined blahaj. The flurry of activity gives me some vague sense of hope that most of the communities I followed on reddit will be able to restart on Lemmy.
Its almost too late, ive seen posts on several subs saying they’re shutting down permanently due to the effective permanent removal of 3rd party mod tools and the misery of the 1st party apps. Reddit could be looking at a mass exodus a-la-digg. It remains to be seen how the fediverse will handle the mass influx of former redditors. If Spez has any shred of decency left he’d apologize profusely, return to a free API, and then beg the mods who are leaving to stay. Knowing capitalists, he absolutely will not.
Nah, read the AMA. He and Reddit (the company) in general are doubling down. I was hoping it was just anchoring (where the initial price for something is so ridiculously high, any other offer even if it’s more than you should pay seems reasonable). But from his comments, and the Devs’ responses, it’s clear it’s basically just a way to kill the API totally for users, I guess the only possible remaining use for the API is AI training. Tech companies would probably pay that much because it genuinely is worth it to them.
Yeah, I saw the comment he made about the Apollo developer. He’s lying plainly, without even trying to refute any claims made against him and his team. He really believes the company can stand to float on a more mainstream userbase. I doubt it honestly. More likely it will start a slow trend downwards as the mods are mostly leaving, so the site will have to deal with massive site wide content moderation and community management issues. He doesn’t care. Maybe he’s already checked out and he plans to step aside once this transitory phase is over.
The idea that reddit can survive purely on a mainstream userbase is ludicrous anyway, the entire point of the website has always been its many niche communities. Its ecosystem of interconnecting and interacting user groups. Thats never going to be a big sell to pure social media oriented users, who already have Instagram and TikTok to fulfill their algorithm needs. So financially I have no idea how they plan to survive in the long term.
Idk how they can fundamentally misunderstand this (and have been for years). They haven’t cared about mods for years, their official app is complete trash. Reddit was always supposed to be an alternative to twitter/Facebook/Instagram/tiktok, not a competitor. Like take the video player for example. Hardly even works most of the time, and is a clear tiktok clone. Why are they doing that? Tiktok and Reddit could not be more different apps. They can pay mods, Reddit can’t or won’t. I expect soon if they survive this they’ll move towards in house moderation.
I joined vlemmy.net today … I think it said there was 1 other user when I joined lol. No idea what I’m doing but so far it seems like I can see all the content from other instances as well.
Yep! The idea behind federation is that there are a bunch of smaller instances that can all talk to each other rather than one big central authority like with Facebook or Reddit!
I didn’t wait for the AMA to get hammered
Shamelessly plugging my https://lemmy.cafe instance.
Signed up! I do think it needs to be linked still though
You don’t have to sign up for every instance you want to.
I can see that you’re currently signed in to your lemmy.ml instance, for example, and if you go there and search for a community in another instance, like gaming@beehaw.org, you’ll be able to view and interact with that community without ever leaving your instance.
So it is already linked in a way. Go ahead and try it out with some communities you’ve seen in other instances.
Oh nice! Okay thank you
While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.
A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like ‘Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance’ that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).
This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.
This will mean that the ‘most recommended’ instance will get absolutely hammered with new registrations though. Some randomisation should be necessary.
But not too random, since some instances ate brand new and there’s no guarantee they’ll stay up, which might put off new users looking for something stable.
Indeed, there is a balance somewhere and the community+devs will have to experiment a bit the comings weeks and months to find the sweet spot.
I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go.
And at some point we also gotta think about how to organize the instances…legally, financially and technically. For now I’m really happy at how the instance I’m on is run. But to be fair. I have no clue who is running it. I have no clue wether I’m going to agree with future decisions. I don’t even know if it will be around next week. Maybe the owner just decides he has more important things in life to do (which is fair tbh).
The model that lemmy is based on gives us all the tools to organize instances however we want to. I really want to see community owned instances. Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.
I’m sure there are similar models of organization in other countries too.
I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I’m seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they’re missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)
I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server (or set of default servers) which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn’t hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.
I do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can’t really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it’s integral to what it is trying to acheive.
What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. “Default servers” could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: “This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people”.
Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.
Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.
Right now the recommended instances on join-lemmy.org are actually based on your system language, so we’re halfway there.
oh that’s great
To be honest I feel like even that’s too complicated. Most people don’t really care about the great technology behind the product; they just want a product that works. That’s in part why the current large social media networks are so large; registration is so easy. The moment you add friction in the form of learning how federation works, normal users will become jaded and just decide not to join the network. If the goal right now is to improve the network effect offered by lemmy, we need to do as much as possible to minimize the amount of people we turn away.
This isn’t to say that we should focus completely on the “default instances”. I agree that ultimately the goal should be to have people move to smaller instances which take advantage of more of lemmy’s wider philosophy. But I think that the first step should be to introduce people to the concept of the fediverse, and then have them interact with it as intended.
I think that with the growing popularity of Lemmy and kbin the registration process will naturally become more intuitive over time. Especially on the short term I expect a lot of tweaking to happen.
Im honestly not so sure about the “more intuitive over time” part. I feel like a lot of people who are using lemmy currently are already pretty technically inclined, and they’re already mildly confused as to how accounts work. If that’s the case, imagine how a normal person feels. I don’t think we can rely on things getting smoothed out over time if we’re to maximize the short-term intake of users caused by the reddit exodus.
In regards to email; the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of “security”.
It’s not a ‘natural state of being’ : up until relatively recently you could easily run your own email server (and most businesses and huge numbers of people actually did), but it’s been co-opted and broken very thoroughly by Google and Microsoft to their benefit.
With the Fediverse, you probably don’t actually want giant servers, as you’re just repeating the concentration of users and thus power in the network into a smaller, fewer set of hands.
With the Fediverse, you probably don’t actually want giant servers, as you’re just repeating the concentration of users and thus power in the network into a smaller, fewer set of hands.
I’m of the opinion that it’s ok and natural for a few larger servers to emerge. The reason why I think it’s natural is because normal people frankly don’t care about the nuanced benefits about finding an instance that caters to their exact moderation preferences or philosophical pontifications about why Big Tech is bad. They just want to click on funny images, upvote them, and maybe comment once in a while.
I think that’s ok since I believe the ultimate goal of social media sites is to serve content for users’ consumption in a non-abusive way. The reason why I believe the fediverse is probably better than traditional social media is because it gives the power of choice. That power doesn’t need to be executed, but because it’s baked into the platform the users always have the ability to exercise it. If a large instance decides to screw over its users, then the users can simply move to another instance and still have full access to the network’s content. That power alone is what makes me ok with having few large instances.
I think the differing view here is ‘natural growth’ vs ‘forced growth’.
I don’t think large servers that come by being large because they’re the preferred choice for a given community, topic, reliability, or whatever other criteria become valuable are bad.
I think setting it up so that a new user is told ‘You go here, and you sign up on this instance.’ and writing all the onboarding stuff to direct them to the mega-instance for the sake of convenience because we can’t figure out how to make it simpler or more clear or explain how federation works isn’t the right path.
I will admit I do not have a fantastic answer on how to explain to someone who has limited technical knowledge exactly WHY federation is the way to go for communication and that the instance you should pick relies almost exclusively on the reliability of the service (is it fast? does it stay running? is it going to exist in six months?) and the trustworthiness of the admin (are they someone who you can deal with in terms of moderation? do you trust they’re not going to use their access to violate any trusts or behave in a way contrary to your beliefs?).
I’m old enough that my first foray into ‘federated’ content was Fidonet, and which BBS you called ‘home’ and posted from was almost exclusively a decision based on the local BBS community and the sysop because the messages and software were otherwise exactly the same from BBS to BBS.
So, my bias is that large instances can’t be close communities and that larger instances require different and more aggressive and impersonal moderation and the bigger you get the more true both become.
the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of “security”.
This is just a false statement; I can email my friends on GMail just fine from my Protonmail account. I think you’re meaning to characterize malicious methods to keep people on the platform, but that issue is orthogonal to getting people registered.
The issue Lemmy has right now is getting normal people registered.
Protonmail is one of the larger providers of email at this point.
If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they’ve taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn’t explicitly to break self-hosting.
If you concentrate everyone into larger providers, you’re allowing them the ability to gatekeep who can and cannot talk to their users, and most people will either not understand this, or be happy to allow it.
I will admit to some bias in not trusting there to be a ‘central’ server that’s run and maintained with the good of the community in mind because there are endless, endless examples of situations where the owners/maintainers of a service have decided to take actions that are fundamentally against their users best interests - which, of course, is probably why anyone is actually here discussing this in the first place.
Could onboarding be improved? Absolutely. But I really don’t think the solution is to have a small handful of blessed instances and try to push everyone to them.
If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they’ve taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn’t explicitly to break self-hosting.
But this isn’t true either? I can easily spin up a SMTP server on a homelab, create an MX record, and email my friends with Gmail accounts as if I was emailing from my Protonmail or Gmail account.
I appreciate you acknowledging your bias against central providers, but to be honest I think it’s leading to some incorrect conclusions. This discussion is also kind of getting derailed, but I’d be happy to continue debating about it.
Interesting; my general experience (and that of customers I spent time working with doing support for various cloud providers) was that you could, theoretically do so, but ‘sending the email to a provider’ and ‘the provider accepts it and delivers it’ were not always the same thing.
Microsoft was especially bad in that it would accept the message, and give you the standard SMTP ‘message accepted’ response but then silently just drop it in the backend, never to be seen again. Didn’t go to spam, didn’t land in a filter just… vanished.
Google, at least, had the decency to tell you when it was going to reject your email, but still.
It was always the same dance: you need a PTR, an SPF record, DKIM, etc. but at the end of the day, Google and Microsoft absolutely gatekeep what gets delivered to their platform, so if it’s critical that your email shows up reliably every time, you have to move into the “ecosystem” of ESPs and all the hoops that are involved there if you want your message to go to the ‘big providers’.
Regional servers are great, especially when it comes to regional laws and customs which people generally want applied (for example UK has quite strong Hate Crime laws, I’m sure DE does too).
I do think however, in early stages, I’d rather know who is running my instance and a few of their personal opinions. For example, are they going to defederate with an instance I quite like because of politics? We are really in early days here and these instances are very unstable whereas the mastodon instances have all been around with thousands of users for quite a time.
Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.
If someone wants to go ahead, count me in.
I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go
This is pretty much how I sign up to stuff in the Fediverse. Since I’m in Europe I look for any of the closest english-speaking instances with a local CCTLD and sign up there - however this time I decided against it because I couldn’t figure out who operated lemmy org uk (my preferred instance before it disappeared). Ended up joining lemmy.one instead and happy with that decision!
There are a lot of instances popping up at the moment and we’ll see many of them disappear again over the coming weeks. Prepare to move around a bit before things stabilise somewhat.
Remember folks, even if you do or don’t like Lemmy it is an alternative that appreciates the increased interest.
It also has something Reddit has been losing. Which is the small town feel. More people now even migrate to discord from Reddit. There was a time when on Reddit I felt like real people interacted. Now it all feels astroturfed.
Also, if they are suppressing mentions via Reddit just mention it on discord
This was enough for me to start my own instance. It’s not too hard with ansible, and Lemmy being Rust it’s not needing that much CPU or RAM.
And I’ll invite my friends here too. If you’re capable of running your own server, do it for your friends. Form small communities and you can always subscribe to the big server communities from your own service.
Dude Lemmy is rust!? Nice
That’ll give me a use for my TrueNAS server that’s for sure. It’s got 24 cores 200gb of RAM and I basically use it exclusively for a NAS.
Now I just have to look into how to set it up.
As long as you get a public IP address, a domain name and TLS certificate, you can federate with other servers.
I run mine in a small Hetzner box. Two gigabytes of RAM, two AMD cores, it’s almost like doing nothing even I’m federating a ton of messages all the time regarding the logs.
There should be a thread for this(starting a instance)
Here, I started one: https://lemmy.ml/post/1201750
Don’t ban lemmygrad and we’ll be happy.
I actually just subscribed to one of your communities.
I’m really curious to see how this will work out. Also very curious about being kinda at a start of the build up of a community. I know it’s not from “scratch”, but it’s still kinda exciting
It is isnt it
It is :)
Same. Most things in life I can say I really wasn’t there from the beginning but this I really think I can lol. I hope I just don’t do the “before it was cool” hipster thing
I haven’t noticed at all, because I follow communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org from my own instance. I had this experience when Mastodon.social kept going down during major Twitter exodus phases. Federation is awesome.
Can you tell me more about the pros and cons of running your own instance? Why did you choose to do that? I’m new at this so I’m very intrigued.
Of course. Here’s a quick one:
Pros:
- You don’t depend on anyone else’s funds or time
- Always available and snappy no matter how busy some parts of the Fediverse get
- You choose who to federate with. Want to talk to both puppy-lovers and puppy-haters? No problem.
- It’s a social media account you really, in every sense of the word, own. Nobody can take it away from you. The lemmy.ml admins could accept the billions* they’re surely being offered right now for their instance, but my account is still mine.
Cons:
- Hosting costs some money, knowledge, and time.
- Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don’t really have a “Federated” timeline
*I’m joking about the billions. Probably.
Thanks for that response. Is there an easy way to start an instance?
What’s your level of technical knowledge? If you already know the terms “VPS” and “Docker”, then yeah, it’s fairly easy IMO (I have some notes here). If you have no idea what you just read, it could be a little tough. There are some rough edges to work out still, but if you join us on Matrix people are fairly helpful.
I honestly don’t know those terms but I’m very tech savvy. I’m running my own home cloud. I play around with Linux. And I just love tinkering until I fully understand how something works. I don’t see the learning curve to be a problem. I’d enjoy the experience which is why I’m seeking it out really. I think I’d really enjoy playing that role in this community.
If you have a spare machine lying around, install proxmox.
It’s a great way to learn VMs and networking.
Then you can create a VM, snapshot it (as a restore point), mess around with docker or podman, break stuff, then restore the VM to try again.
All this runs on your local network, so when it comes to setting up a Lemmy instance, you are going to want access to it from the internet. Things like Cloudflare and Tailscale can make this very easy.It’s a wonderful rabbit hole of learning!
I would recommend /r/homelab or /r/selfhosted but I think those communities are still finding a home on the fediverse+1 to Proxmox, it has been my lifeline when it comes to playing around with self hosting stuff! I’d heard about hypervisors before but was still under the impression that virtualizing had a ton of overhead (there is still some overhead, but not by much).
Additionally, Proxmox Backup Server is a really nice pairing as well!
Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don’t really have a “Federated” timeline
This seems like a pretty serious flaw in the federation protocol. Hope it’s fixed at some point.
The “subscribe & push” model is practically fundamental to ActivityPub. There’s pros and cons to this design, but ultimately I think it’s confusing and cumbersome for users…
While true, this only affects people who are hosting and running their own instance. And if they’re doing that, it isn’t that big of a deal.
Users that might struggle with the concepts are probably joining larger instances that are already federated, so the problem is solved as soon as they find the “All” button.
Is it in the ballpark of “easy if you’re a techie and experienced with Linux” to use an old PC as a server instead of paying to host it?
The short answer: yes.
The long answer: Yes, but…
If this is your home network, you’re providing attackers with an entry point into your network. You’re also giving yourself an avenue to get DDOS’d etc. You’d have to open ports and get that set up - or deal with a reverse proxy or whatever.
But generally it’s as easy as running a Docker container and pointing a domain at your IP.
And, of course, ensuring that your IP provider doesn’t run behind a Client-Grade Network Address Translator (CG-NAT). Otherwise, you’re better off renting a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or if you’re particularly strapped of money and have a lot of patience, you can bridge it with your home server using a Virtual Private Network (VPS) and a good amount of scripting to remap the ports accordingly.
Might be my vacation project then. But I probably won’t use it seriously if I’m not sure I can keep it decently secured.
This is the same type of scandal like the pao one. Reddit changed completely after that and the massive bans of subreddits. Only that time nobody decided to leave. I hope we grow to millions strong here soon and Reddit becomes a forgotten shell
Only that time nobody decided to leave.
Well, they did, but it was the r/FatPeopleHate folks who left. But they jumped ship to voat, which doesn’t even exist anymore.
I remember a lot of regular redditors going to voat during that debacle. Voat seemed amazing for a while. The trouble was that voat couldn’t handle the influx very well and couldn’t solve the frequent outages, so most of the people who migrated bounced back to reddit. Then voat started showing how friendly they were to migrants from subs like /r/FatPeopleHate, which drove the remaining “well adjusted” people back to reddit.
I wonder where are they now
I think they went to saidit because the top posts there are all racist shit.
Said it looks pretty good. I wonder if we can take over as well?
Twitter, most likely
mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn’t know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.
the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it’s going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.
having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.
kbin.social is also suffering
sorry it just has the best UI out of the one’s i’ve tried, i didn’t mean to kill it v-v
We’re glad to have ya, regardless!
I agree, the integration of microblogs + threads is brilliant and I hope people keep using it.
Yes, it was working ok before the AMA, now it’s feeling sluggish. I guess is expected considering the amount of people coming over. New users are all welcome, and we’re glad to have you.
Yeah just made a kbin (I have a lemmy too, but found I liked kbin’s ui more) and it’s been a bit slow. I figure it’s cause the ama went so badly!
Hmm I fully understand why, but every page on most instances (I’ve been on a few different ones) is taking a while to load (nowhere near as long as the billion dollar website Reddit takes to load their “official” website though, lol.)
I joined during the general influx so I don’t have a good gauge but how much has lemmy grown since this whole debacle? How many users were here like a month ago?
a month ago it was like around 400-500 online users, today is 2300
