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.
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.
Yeah, mine used to be listed but now its not :(
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.
I honestly haven’t noticed any problems. I’m using Jerboa and on Lemmy.ca
😎
Well shucks! Y’all city slickers can come n join us at theGarden.land we just put the kettle on for ya
Natalie Portland OMG!!! I loved you in Store Wars and Black Duck.
This comment deserves more recognition.
I joined a smaller instance for this reason
Same here. A smaller instance with an application gate. My experience has been very smooth for the most part.
Yeah, that’s the only reason, riiight. :D
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.
Not to mention the companies that own the backbone…?
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.
That’s too complicated for the average user.
Maybe but it’s a big point of the Fediverse
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need user caps on a per-instance basis tbh
If it grows fast and hard it might happen naturally. lemmy.world is suffering already.
Ya I’d much rather lemmy.world set an actual user cap of what they can actually handle ^^
Just accepting users until your system stops working is a bad system.
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.
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?
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.
