I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.
I’m hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I’m open to a few public users.
Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.
Isn’t 18.1 already live?
It’s in release candidate (rc.9) so fairly mature but not technically released.
All fine and dandy, but don’t just pick a random one close to you. Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don’t even require an email address to sign up.
The biggest issue is that you’re giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?
You don’t need to provide an email address to sign up at most of the big instances. I think lemmy.world is the exception. Even your instance lemmy.ca does not require an email address.
If you really want to provide one, you could use a service that does email forwarding. Some examples are https://simplelogin.io (owned by Proton Mail), and Firefox Relay (Owned by Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser). These both have free tiers. There is also https://duckduckgo.com/email/ from the people who make the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. That one I believe gives you unlimited new randomised email addresses for free. Very low attachment size limit but great for something like Lemmy.
You’re right that you don’t have to on most large instances, and that you can make burner email accounts if you have to.
But this post was simply about telling people to be careful of smaller, less known instances. The links you provided are excellent ways to protect yourself, even outside of Lemmy.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn’t say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you’re behind CG-NAT you don’t get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don’t think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
I am aware of how a public facing IP address works, and how little information it does give, by itself. It is still a privacy concern, and can be used in conjunction with other data to launch social engineering attacks or to help narrow down other data.
Possibly, but you don’t have to be an admin of the instance the user is on to get their IP if thats what you’re trying to do.
IP address doesn’t mean anything, really.
Like if you are ginger or not
Pfft - everyone knows you need a soul to get online
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat
In what way is it more GDPR ready than other instances? I assume it uses the same server software?
By having an actual policy. That lists the usage of data, 3rd parties and the responsibilities of the instance owner.
For people still looking for an instance close to their location: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Yes, I just made the switch to a closer instance yesterday. So much faster. I was on lemmy.world for the past few weeks but then I realized the server is hosted in Europe and I was getting 144ms ping from US east coast. This new instance I’m on, I’m getting 22ms ping.
You can test latency yourself from cmd by typing “ping lemmy.world” for example
Do you mind sharing your new instance? I am also on the US east coast
You can see what instance a lemmy user used from their username (
@user@instance). Based on their user name, the GP is on lemm.ee instance.Oh cool, thanks!
How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
You can click the “use map” button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can’t find a instance that you like that is close don’t worry. Because server closeness doesn’t matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.
From the map, there are 21 fediverse servers in Taiwan but none of them are Lemmy. There are even fewer in China (only 4 based on this map if I select “All” in the option).
AFAIK there aren’t any Chinese language content about Lemmy yet.
The center of Fediverse of Asia seems to be Singapore and Tokyo.
Also how can I know which servers are federated\defederated to most of the Lemmy instances?
Servers are federated by default so unless it has been defederated by big instances you will have no problems. Important thing is instance you are joining having captcha/email verification because the ones without is suspectible to bot sign ups. So big instance might defederate with them to prevent bot attacks
Can you create Lemmy accounts on Mastodon servers?
Yeah this doesn’t show lemmy instances? Only mastodon and other weird shit.
If you go to the drop down menu at the top, you can specify what you are looking for. Select “all” and Lemmy will be on the list.
Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.
Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!
added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too
Can you elaborate?
Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can’t moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.
They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can’t find it at the moment.
this post made me move instances and i am glad that i did, thanks!
What’s a good one if you’re in Toronto?
Thanks
move to a smaller instance that is hosted close to you.
How do I know the distance from an instance to me?
Can resolve the ip of the instance, then use an ip locator to get a rough distance
Check this out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
I signed on to lemmy.world in June as that seemed like The Place, but now I’m thinking of switching to a lesser populated instance. I still haven’t found an instance that I like enough to switch to though. Right now, even with the performance issues, lemmy.world still feels like the most suitable instance for me.
You still need an extra acc onthebig ones if you want to usethe apps though. Not all instances are supported.
Which app have you been struggling with? Both Jerboa and Connect worked fine with different servers for me, I’m guessing others are fine too
? On all Lemmy apps I’ve used, you can just type the URL for the Lemmy instance your account is on, even if it’s not on the “default” list.
Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)
Was here thinking, couldn’t I host my own instance for my own usage?
Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.
I know this may not be popular but I may only host to myself. I have a VPS for my personal website and other projects that has some free processing power available (its a Hetzner ARM VPS, the cheapest), so I also need to figure out if Lemmy runs on ARM SoCs. I figure it must run since some people may try to run it on RPIs.
From what I understand about Lemmy, the only way to disable signups completely is by defederating. Meaning, you would not be able to view other communities from other Lemmy instances like .world or beehaw.
To get around this, you can switch to application signup like beehaw and just ignore/reject every application but this would also mean that anyone can view your instance as a guest. Like you can go to lemmy.world and view posts and comments without logging in
Atleast, that’s what I understand. Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
You can’t disable registrations from what I’m understanding but you can make them pending some approval. So in my case I’d just ignore any registration done.
It’s absolutely your right to do so
