https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/reddit-migration-lemmy-kbin/
Lemmy and Kbin instances are dealing with the strain of thousands of new users signing up in protest of Reddit.
I think the main issue is the growth isn't linear. It's sporadic. Usually a big bump after every Reddit fuck up. Lots of bumps lately. Another one coming on the 30th.
Do you think there are a lot of people on reddit who are still waiting for the 30th to make their lemmy/kbin account? I was assuming that most who were going to come over here from this blowup had moved already.
I use Sync and saw someone suggest to the developer (who is adapting the app to Lemmy) that when the app stops working, it leaves a message indicating that Lemmy is a possible alternative. Not to say that suggestion will be taken, but I think it's entirely possible that a decent chunk of basically uninformed users will find their favorite app inoperable and find themselves, directly or indirectly, referred to Lemmy.
Not sure. But I am still using Apollo and I don't plan on downloading the official app when it dies so at the very least, I will go from 70/30 fediverse to almost 100 percent fediverse.
I think its a case that those who moved recently (my account here is recent but Ive been on Lemmy.ml for 2 years), had seen the writing on the wall.
When the effects start to kick in, there will be another few large influxes then when the majority left on Reddit wonder why the site went to shit overnight and where everyone else went, they will leave too.
It will be very similar to what happened with Digg all those years ago.
Yeah. When Apollo, RiF, Relay, et al stop working, a large amount of people who just use Reddit on their phones and don't really engage with the hows and whys of the platform itself will suddenly get pushed to either figure out the Reddit official app or try something else. There will probably be a bump then, via whatever is available on the App Store/Play. I expect most will just stop using Reddit and continue using whatever other apps they already use that work (ie Instagram, Twitter, Mastodon, et al). A significant amount will just use the official Reddit app. A substantial minority will start to look for Reddit alternatives though.
Of those who stick with Reddit, or just abandon it; there will be a hole left, a Reddit shaped hole in their heart (or at least their bathroom doomscrolling). Even new Reddit won't fill that hole after July 1st. As more and more abandon Reddit and find their way to Lemmy and kbin, that hole can be filled better here.
I think Lemmy and kbin already have that critical mass. They'll be interesting enough to maintain their communities and organically grow, so the continued influx of Reddit refugees will just accelerate their growth.
I think most are either waiting to see what happens to reddit first or just procrastinating.
I feel like i go around in circles saying this - there are literally hundreds of servers. If servers had caps, i.e. user caps and community caps, then people would be forced to spread out, rather than relying on two or three big servers. Otherwise we just have a central server, which is Reddit with extra steps.
Yeah. Personally, I also think the join-lemmy.org page should just be a randomised list of instances, not "recommended" and "popular". It'll help strengthen the decentralisation and make sure that instances are able to cope with a lot of new users coming to Lemmy easier.
Not all instances are equivalent, some of them have very different politics and moderation policies.
Good point. I think something like a short questionnaire asking what the user is interested in and how they align, stuff like that, then showing a randomised list of instances that match that would be a better idea, then.
Either way, I still think the current way of listing the instances needs to change.
Hard agree also - and the sign up button on each instance should just link to that randomised list, and people can join from there. Too many people go to "big" communities on the two or three big servers and want to be part of that - its a misunderstanding of how federation works and the UI needs to teach people that it doesnt really matter.
It kind of doesn't matter, but the moderation policies, local timeline, server uptime/admin skill, blocked instances, and the theoretical longevity of instances can vary widely between instances.
The plethora of "Baby's First Selfhost" servers don't make for good Lemmy instances for example, because they are likely to be mismanaged and there's a good chance they will disappear unexpectedly once the hype dies down in a couple months.
Or another example, you have servers that are essentially unmoderated and full of hate speech and illegal content, or heavily moderated servers that ban dissent and defed liberally, and everything in-between.
Well shucks! Y’all city slickers can come n join us at theGarden.land we just put the kettle on for ya
This is quite the conundrum that the fediverse requires corporations like fastly/cachefly/cloudflare to stay afloat/responsive at scale.
And quite the conundrum that the electricity they used is often owned and operated by oppressive governments
You can play this game with everything, we do what we can with what we have.
Sure, it'd be great to have a community based on open source and operated electricity, to prevent the harms that may come from centralized control, but sometimes things just aren't feasible, and we may not even want to make them that way.
We can incorporate the benefits of cloudflare while using our control of the platform to minimize the harm, we just haven't done it yet.
Having an open and decentralized cloudflare solution just isn't feasible, due to what they provide.
While I'm all for decentralization, I don't really see a reasonable way around this. Someone has to manage the infrastructure, and at a certain scale that's going to be large corporations. However, as long as these services continue to be interchangeable and unlinked to the fediverse, I don't see this as too serious of an issue.
@scarecrw @hedge @useful_idiot This, as long as you are not vendor locked it's fine. I use cloudflare, but I'd have no problems migrating to a different provider tomorrow
This is true, It is much safer to rely on providers at the protocol layer vs the application layer.
They desperately need to support horizontal scaling. I'm sure there are enough nerds that could help them out there.
But we already have horizontal scaling in the form of separate instances. We just need to do a better job staying spread out. Making individual instances bigger is not a good thing, it makes everything more centralized.
tbh I was thinking about this today, and I think there is some merit to having the setup be slightly obtuse so that more of the people on any given thing are the kind of people who think this kind of tech is important, rather than people who don't give a shit about that.
At least, I like when spaces are more densely that kind of person. But other people should have nice things too I guess.
I’d hate for this to become an echo chamber of people that understand federated services. That excludes a lot of people that have no interest in it that have valuable input.
Not really. They're all connected anyways, and if they use an app they'll probably never notice apart from the @instance.com theu have to put at the end of some communities
It doesn't require users to enforce. Individual instances should probably start having caps and close signups/invites occasionally.
Something that might help is a (preferably semi-official) page to direct people to for signup, where it randomly directs you to sign up for any participating server. You could have participating servers give some kind of feedback on how much signup pressure they're seeing to slow down incoming rates when they have too many new users too quickly (wouldn't resolve something like Reddit dying, but might be generally useful to turn down extra redirects to you if you're getting an influx from elsewhere).
The issue is that until accounts are more portable, getting sent to a bad server isn't great. Ideally there would be a mechanism for users to mirror their account to a second server so they don't lose everything if a server goes down as well.
I've been directing people to the awesome lemmy instances Github page because that's what I used and it seems frequently updated
I hear what you're saying, but horizontal scaling also gives you improved reliability too, which is good for individual instances.
I for one would happily horizontally scale an instance I was running (which I am not for now) on my K8s lab. Why? Because I can and because I like it!
Making individual instances bigger is not a good thing, it makes everything more centralized.
I agree. I think one of the easiest ways to encourage users to bring up more instances is to minimize the requirements and steps needed to get a Kbin or lemmy instance running. Its not a very complex process to get an instance running, but it can be difficult to locate the relevant information you might need to spin up an instance without reaching out for support. That could end up putting people off of setting up an instance.
Is the blocker here that each instance is a single postgres/Lemmy process? I imagine a clustered inplementstion of the Lemmy backend could be used to shard individual communities to dedicated containers when they reach a given size, proxies through a community away load balancer? More to manage but would let instances scale up/down as needed. There are costs associated with this, but those of us who run instances do it because we like playing this game.
Yeah, from what I understand most instances are pretty much the modern day equivalent of a phpBB forum on a server in someone’s bedroom. This situation is basically an invitation for the sort of people who play with Kubernetes for fun, get one of them involved and a lot of these problems will be at least reduced a fair bit.
Thats the reason why I had chosen diggit.xyz in the First place. Because i knew there will be problems and because i laughed really hard that the instance was called diggit :D
Would be possible to run your own instance from within the app you use to browse? In other words, is there a reason for a personal Lemmy instance, with only me as a user and no communities, to run even when I'm not using it to interact with other communities?
Curated communities would likely choose to defederate from instances like that since they have no barrier for entry, and may be bots, spam, or bad actors. If you're joining an established instance, then you'll at least get a local community.
If it works like email, you'll miss content that is posted when the app isn't running. I have a cheap hetzner box going that is running my personal lemmy instance but I don't think it would work well to have it only running part of the time.