Hello there!
It has been a while since our last update, but it's about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.
So let's go over some of these misconceptions together.
"Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse".
While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network
The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don't like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.
And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members.
"Lemmy.World should close down registrations"
Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what's what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn't even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.
Which brings us to the third point:
"Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that's why the server is down all the time"
This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.
The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they'll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very 'expensive' sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.
So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That's one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.
"Why do they need another sysop who works for free"
Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.
We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.
What I find most ridiculous about people claiming lemmy.world is too big and therefore bad for the Fediverse is simply... Have you people wondered why it got so big?
During the crucial first weeks of the Reddit migration, the single time period with the most chance of bringing new users, pretty much all larger Lemmy instances closed their registrations - they couldn't handle the influx. Other big ones decided to immediately defederate everybody, they were afraid of having to moderate content. And a few did remain open and federated, but they were also extremely niche and focused on their own political side of the spectrum.
Lemmy.world however remained open, remained with active admins that helped the first moderators, and kept upgrading the server at a very fast rate - you might forget it now, but Lemmy was massively slow and frustrating and then a new Lemmy.world update would drop and it would feel like a different website.
So yeah, "bad for the Fediverse" for being the only instance that kept up with the demand at the most necessary time.
Thanks Lemmy.world team.
Damn I never thought about that. Lemmy.world has been a rock. And a transparent one at that, I love it.
So, a diamond 💎
🫴💎
“We’re rich!”^65,535
"We're rich!" 🧔🏼♂️📱👉💰👈📱🧔 "We're rich!"
"We're rich!" 🧔🏿♀️📱☝️ 👆📱🧔🏽♂️ "We're rich!"
Something about living long enough and becoming the villain...
EDIT: Phew, my age is showing trying to use a meme phrase! This didn't convey what I intended. I meant to say that .world has been unfairly vilified by some. Will be more judicious in using this phrase in the future!
I'm convinced now that people saying something is "Bad for the fediverse" is just their ignorance and xenophobia showing.
Look at the shitposting or lemmy memes going around and you'll see a lot of people are actually afraid of users coming from reddit and spoiling the experience here.
I'm sure others don't want us growing because, consciously or unconsciously, they won't have as much traction or get as much attention. More people means you have less of a voice.
We can't argue about federation on the net, avoiding corporate control, or whatever while sticking our hand out and stopping people from joining. It just doesn't work that way.
People complaining about the size of a social media platform are missing the point of a social media platform...
This is the first time in my life I've seen dislike of the userbase of an another site called 'xenophobia'.
Especially weird since 90% of Lemmy is fresh off reddit themselves.
Personally I just don't want the shitty aspects of the reddit community seeping over here. It's a fact that reddit userbase has been facebookised, to the degree where I frequently see people who are outright stupid (repeatedly posting threads to wrong subreddits, ignoring mod messages, unable to comprehend basic English... stuff that I'd expect to see on Facebook and not reddit), or focused on memes and quips to the point where any discussion is flooded with such moronic content. There's still (at least) tens of thousands of people on reddit who I'm sure would be great contributors on Lemmy too if they decide to switch, and I hope they will. But I don't want all of reddit here. Is that really so bad, to not want to look at unfiltered normie crap? Reddit was good (if it ever was good) precisely because it was a bit elitist in its design and its culture.
Maybe people can join somewhere else too? Make a Fediverse equivalent of Facebook/Instagram or something. Lemmy is not all of Fediverse and doesn't have to be for everyone.
Like half of your complaints are literally good things. Yes, people want to be heard and not practically hidden from 90% if they don't get enough upvotes on their post/comment during the crucial early time frame, as on bigger reddit subs. Lemmy is not a social media platform anyway, its goal is not to facilitate socialisation among the users and it doesn't need many millions of users to work well.
I agree with all of the points you made, there’s nothing wrong with certain instances or communities gearing themselves towards particular interests or demographics (like more tech savvy people, longer replies, etc like old school forums).
Also a little taken aback by the misuse of the word xenophobia which doesn’t make much sense in the context it was used in.
I don't want all of Reddit to come flooding in all at once.
But one thing I've noticed is that the entire Fediverse has a lot of instance-specific stuff going on. It's really a question of finding the right instance for you. For example, I didn't particularly like mastodon.social as an instance of Mastodon, but I've found other instances where I gel with the userbase well. It's actually made the experience more pleasant.
If you're willing and able, setting up a Lemmy instance for some specific community is actually a good idea. During my holiday break, I'm going to be working on setting up Lemmy for my town and maybe even a club website that I have been assigned control over. .world will suffice in the interim.
It upsets me that people can't understand this. Lemmy was getting hit like crazy. Even through all that, it was better than reddit. I adore lemmy and the .world admins. I seriously can't wait to see it grow.
And besides closing registrations, many others required that you request it, then wait for approval. Of course most went with the path of least resistance - I know I did (using an alt account now because of the DDOS attacks).
Aahh please write an essay about why you'd like to join our server and why you chose your username. Who tf wants to go through a casting couch for an app you'll use while taking a dump?
Yeah, really. I get why some instances want to be selective, but it was a bit jarring to me just how many were when I was looking for a way to try Lemmy out.
It literally takes ten seconds and it's an easy way to filter out bots.
lemmy.ca had semi-closed invites and I just wrote that I was migrating away from reddit and wanted to join a local instance as a Canadian. It was like two sentences and I got approved in under an hour.
Sure, you're not wrong. But a ton of genuine users are simply checking out what this Lemmy thing is at this stage, and asking them to elaborate why they want to be here, even if in a few lines, is going to turn them away. Instances should be allowed to enforce this if they want, I just think there should be a way for users to quickly find a less restrictive instance. This is what turned me away from Lemmy in my early attempt to use it - I just wanted to check it out on whim and was told there's a manual approval.
I don't even agree that this is a good way to keep out bad bots. We already have farms where you just hire someone in a country with cheap labor to just create accounts all day.
My experience exactly.
I think it becomes a problem on larger instances that don't have the manpower to manually read and flag users, which would definitely be the place that .world is in. .ca is a much smaller instance and it's still feasible to do stuff like this by hand.
I don't think .world would benefit from implementing a check, all things considered though. The easier it is to onboard to the fediverse the better we'll all be in the long run, even if it's concentrated in a few central places.
Everyone complaining about the Beehaw registration is what got me to check it out.
It was certainly not an "essay," just pretty much a paragraph saying I'm not a bot or troll and in a few minutes I was approved. This was maybe 2 weeks after the Reddit protest, so it may have been worse initially, but my signup was painless.
I have a few accounts to see how the first few months will go with defederations go, but most instances I go to look much the same at this point. I like the feel of Beehaw best and I'd say it's my primary right now, but the defederation and signup does seem to have slowed growth.
World is my second most used, and I still check out new instances, but between those 2 the majority of my needs are covered right now. I think it's cool you can get different "flavors" of Lemmy, so everyone doesn't have to like all the instances, but most of them seen to play well together.
I just don't understand the need to rip on the ones doing things differently when that is one of the features of the Fediverse. I don't even like seeing people trash EH or LG because it's free advertising to new people they exist. I don't want to see feeds listed with their names, and the complaining is just an attraction to people who actually want that garbage.
Especially if you have no clue what it’s about and just want to check it out
Weird, I just wrote something like:
Honestly, my instance had that, and was also going through downtime growing pains from the influx of users, so I had to submit multiple times.
'I'm from Reddit trying to find a new home' and 'I like coffee' are not what I'd call an essay or a casting couch personally, but to each their own.
If you call a couple sentences "an essay"... what are you even doing writing "essays" in random comments while taking a dump?
Now you put it that way, thank you lemmy world. I probably wouldn't migrate out of R itself if I didn't see your site and made it look familiar. Transition had been easy for me and now, I barely go back there unless via libreddit.
Are you using https://old.lemmy.world?
Yep, even now. I had a really hard time (mentally) doing the transfer before, until I stumbled upon old LW. Still on this format, tbh, it's just more compact for me. I'm thinking that other lazier / lurkier users might get encouraged to make the jump if the place is familiar to what they will leave behind. Of course, there is still a learning curve, but since everything looked a little bit like the old R, it was intuitive enough for me.
I'm forced to shift to the usual formatting when I have to switch to sh.itjust.works because of the downtime, but when i go back to lemmy.world, it's always on the old format mode.
And I am a bit talkative here, as I read that lurking doesn't really help the fediverse. Wish I can contribute in a more intellectual content-making kind of way, but as I don't have expertise (only interest), my only contribution is to add activity.
old.lemmy.world is just running mlmym, btw. There is another one running at mlmym.org, where you can use any instance. Or you can run the software yourself if desired.
Could also maybe pitch the idea of an old style interface to the sh.itjust.works maintainers, that way they'd have one built-in to the site itself just like it is on lemmy.world.
292 instances listed for the first 9 days this month! That's over 33 per day.
You guys are in the middle of a huge battle. I wish I could assist but it's outside my experience.
Could not be stated any better.
I definitely think the lemmy.world admins have done everything right so far. I’m not sure if there are actually people saying it’s bad for the fediverse but the sentiment I see is that consolidating onto one instance causes you to lose some of the benefits of decentralization. At this point, there are plenty of general instances with open registrations that aren’t experiencing these attacks so it’s best for at least some people on lemmy.world to try to migrate to another instance. For one thing, that persons experience will be better since they won’t see as much downtime anymore, but more importantly it makes lemmy.world less of a target since these attacks are meant to affect as many people as they can. It’ll probably always be one of the biggest instances but the person might decide it’s not worth their time anymore if enough people move to other instances that they’re affecting a small percentage of the whole Lemmy population.
Oh there are plenty of people claiming this. I actually started with a small instance but moved here due to lack of content that the smaller instance could see.
One of Lemmy's shortcomings is that, by default, instances are only aware of local communities and the specific communities that its users have deliberately subscribed to. If a user subscribes to !funny@lemmy.world for example, the instance does not scan lemmy.world for more communities. There are some small instances running federation helper bots to fix this, but I ended up here due to the lack of visible content on the small instance. Yes, I know there are directories of Lemmy communities, but initiating a federation request on a small instance is not intuitive.
Nah. It comes from the possibility of being held personally liable for any illegal content hosted on your instance. No one running a small instance wants to get thrown in jail because some other instance isn't moderating effectively when that content gets federated to their local database.
It's a real fear that I haven't seen many people address yet.
This likely depends on the jurisdiction, but don't some countries have provisions in telecomms law that exclude service providers/platforms from liability for content posted by users?
In asking this, I did a brief search and found that, as expected, it does vary. This appears to be a decent overview from a couple years ago for anyone else interested!
This is only true provided a good faith effort has been made to moderate the platform to remove such content. At least in the US.
I think that instance hosts were/are more worries about moderating illegal content like CP, copyrighted works, etc. where just blocking isn’t enough. Rather content may actually need to be deleted from the server to avoid legal liability.
It's self moderating only to a degree. Anybody can make their own community on lemmyworld, and post whatever they like. Any report you make against a bad community can get you banned from it because they can see who reported what.
So the only way to deal with a bad community is to get side-wide admins involved, which is not a quick process.
This is one of those "crisis of opportunity" moments. We're witnessing the start of something new.