To support decentralization and spread, should lemmy.world close registration at some point to prevent a performance overload due to too many users? Of course, if registration is disabled, there could be a hint placed somewhere near that from other instances you can interact with content on lemmy.world just like you had registered on it. There could be a link to join-lemmys instance overview.
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.
Having the user count far exceed what the servers can handle is also detrimental to the ecosystem.
People aren’t patient. And the current instability we’re seeing will just make people give up on Lemmy after a brief attempt to settle in.
You raise a valid point. But finding new communities is much harder in smaller instances. So there is a chance the user will not find content they are interested in.
Isn’t the intent of federation, however, that every instance should have access to every community? So even those small instances be able to access the same communities.
Not seeing something means you’ve intentionally defederarated them (or maybe they’ve defederarated you?)
Or a server is dying somewhere.
They do have access to every community. But it won’t show up in the community tab until someone in their instance have already joined that community. Correct me if am wrong.
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.
Some of the issues might be on the software side, so it’ll take some time until it can scale to more hardware resources. But yeah, I agree! What scares me more is the monetization path. Servers can become a really expensive.
With a larger userbase comes more people willing to donate, so it will depend on whether that revenue stream grows faster or slower than the increasing server costs. Mastodon.world has run fine on donations alone but lemmy.world will soon outgrow it so we’re entering uncharted territory for Ruud. Mastodon.social is significantly larger but I believe they also have sponsors and grants to complement the donations.
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.
We’re already seeing the development move forward thanks to it. Today’s updates made a huge difference in .world performance.
Lemmy.world - on the way to being the new reddit
Cheered on by its new users.
I’m definitely willing to deal with some jank for a while while u/ruud tries to get on top of the quickly expanding userbase.
If the hint and instructions are clearly visible then it sounds like a great idea.
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).
Even as a small instance operator, the media storage increases at a pretty steady rate. It’s probably going to be a case of months or even years before it starts getting to costing money I will notice. But, still I guess we can by then start to purge very old stuff if we’re not a big instance though.
Funilly enough, apparently they have enough server power and the bottleneck is the software. Or so I was told.
This is the one of the best takes here. It’s a delicate balance. Performance, cost, and manageability. Fail in any of these, and it doesn’t matter, you’ll either lose access to the site or be unable to manage it.
If staffing or money are insufficient, the site should do what’s necessary for survival, but only just before that threshold is exceeded. Users are important, but self destruction is not an option.
It’s already laggy and unstable. Maybe more hardware and improved software will help, but it might just be hard for lemmy to grow.
It’s not hard for Lemmy to grow at all. Use a different server. There’s no upside to being on a crowded server. Join a fast and reliable server. Hit “all.” Done.
Lemmy is designed to grow easily.
I think it should redirect users to other instances. But ultimately, we need account migration like mastodon.
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.
As an immigrant from reddit myself, the multiple instances and where to call my home was the first big hurtle by far. With that, my biggest concern was if the instance I was joining was going to allow me to see everything in the fediverse since instances can be blocked.
Right now I have a kbin and Lemmy account. Because although the Lemmy account I’m on isn’t being blocked by anyone, I’m finding it difficult to find some instances where on kbin the same search yields the results I’m looking for.I agree, I initially focused on Lemmy.world but as I understood the Fedverse better I shifted to a smaller instance. I think we need to let people get into Lemmy, and then people will naturally spread out.
I couldn’t get anything to load in my phone browser half the time either and my updoots never register. Then I downloaded the jebora app and when it disconnects from the server it flashes at the bottom so you know when it won’t post.
Now I can see everything on the site all the time
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I think Beehaw degenerating was a good thing. Their rules are pretty totalitarian. It would have happened eventually anyway, better to do it sooner to effect the least amount of content I get.
What’s to stop .world “defederating” and cutting all the new users off completely.
It’s an odd platform and one that feels like it could all fall apart to someone completely new to it all.
Well Ruud who runs .world also runs Mastodon.world which is a fairly large mastodon instance, so he is somewhat of a known quantity and has experience running large Fediverse servers. His mastodon server has handled a large population and donations happen through Open Collective for transparency as well. He also runs Calckey.world though that is much smaller.
Do you think spez was good once?
Not really. Also by your logic you can’t trust anyone ever because there is always a risk they turn bad at some point in the future. All we can do is evaluate what we have in front of us at the moment. Current evidence suggests Ruud is trustworthy, committed and capable of running a large Fediverse instance.
I honestly think during the sign up the registration to a server needs to be randomized to spread the load. That and allow the user counts to be global and not just to your instance and you then have user load balancing.
If we could also migrate our data between servers with a backup server option. When lemmy.world goes down, just switch to a different randomized backup server.
The danger in randomizing servers is that some smaller servers not only have less than 99% uptime but are also just run by random regular people who couldn’t handle the increased load and/or have no desire or ability to keep the servers running long term. It could maybe work if the randomization occurs from within a vetted list.
Account migration is a feature that has been noted for the future and would indeed be very important since it would essentially make the entire network bulletproof. Being able to move instances and/or link accounts across multiple instances would create the necessary redundancy and reduce fears of choosing a smaller instance as home.
If there is a performance overload isn’t that a natural block to more users?
Yes but it would hurt the rest of the Fediverse that gets content from here.
Maybe… haven’t seen any issue accessing lemmy.world content but maybe there are delays.
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.
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.
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.
People figured out everyone doesn’t need to use the same exact X to have access to the same things X provides many times throughout civilization. Maybe the join page needs to communicate it better, but also people need to try to figure it out.
Yes. Encourage people to use federation FFS.
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.
Maybe Guides / Information could be shown on the lemmy web frontend by default to lower the entry barrier?
Having something there would definitely be wise I think, given how many people are apparently just being sent links direct to a specific instance to sign up (and therefore skipping join-lemmy entirely). But it would need to be very short, to the point, and sum things up in a way non-techy folks can immediately understand. In my experience so far, a lot of people here struggle to explain the basic concept without writing a whole esseay about it, and nobody is gonna read a wall of text on the signup page.
-
