this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Spread Out: How To Speed Up Lemmy (lemmy.fediverse.observer)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

There are many lemmy instances in the world, but currently most people are using lemmy.world. This is why everything has gotten so slow.

You don't have to delete your lemmy.world account, but check out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map it's a geo-based map of lemmy instances -- explore stuff nearest you, pick one, sign up, search , subscribe and begin interacting with your favorite communities. It's easy, free and it will be faster. Try it!

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

An export/import for "subscribed" communities would encourage a lot of people to do this.

[–] can 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you link the post? I’m not able to find it.

[–] can 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] can 5 points 1 year ago

Ah I'm having trouble now too. I know I saw one somewhere. I'll update if I find it.

[–] timbuck2themoon 11 points 1 year ago

There needs to be a "MigrationPub" spec to export your info to be ready to import into another user login.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am planning on moving to lemmy.blahaj.zone soon-ish but I have 2 questions.

  1. How do I move to another instance?

  2. Can I move freely? For example, could I switch to lemmy.blahaj.zone to lemmy.world to kbin.social every day? I don;t like the idea of being "tied down" to an instance for a long time.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As far as I know, account migration from one instance to another is currently not possible on kbin/lemmy but with the sudden influx of users and developers I believe it is on the roadmap for at least kbin and likely lemmy too. For now you’ll have to use multiple accounts, but eventually you should be able to migrate if you choose to.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I may wait until that becomes possible, although if the wait is long, I'll make a new account.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Yeah do whatever you decide is best! No right way to do it. Some have suggested just considering accounts temporary as we all experiment with what works best until more features are rolled out. But I know I’m already attached to my existing accounts and reluctant to make more.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

you can have accounts on multiple instances, go ahead and sign up. your info is NOT transferred, so you'll need to re-subscribe to your communities, and your posts stay on the instance you wrote them from.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wouldn't this put me at risk of that smaller instance defederizing and removing everything I contribute while logged in to that instance?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is whats kind of not clear to me. While its clear what the benefit is for lemmy.world or some instance you move from, its less clear what the benefit for the individual moving is such as myself. I have more risk, its a hassle, the smaller server might itself get overloaded or break. Sometimes it feels ‘safer in numbers’. Unsure. Feels like I would be best off if everyone else moved and took on the risk while I stayed and reaped the benefits of them reducing the load rather than me doing it.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Someone explained it a little better in another post. It will not erase my content. So if I'm logged in under my lemm.ee account but post on a lemmy.world instance. If for some reason lemm.ee got defederized, my post or comments would still be there at lemmy.world I would just not be able to use my lemm.ee account going forward.

It seems like this is the way to go like OP says

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah. This is all I see: Software: Lemmy Signups: no

As long as this tool includes people's personal instances, it's useless.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Signups: no" can also just mean that your sign-up will be checked manually, like on older instances like beehaw and sopuli

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah they really need to update that binary presentation. Our instance says no registrations, but we do have them open, you just gotta pass the requirements: email, sign up question and captcha.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy.world has only existed for a month. Why the confidence that it’s here to stay?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's run through the Open Collective, and is also run by Ruud who runs one of the larger Mastodon instances as well as some other stuff on the Fediverse I believe. They're a fairly trusted actor in the space and I think pretty transparent with everything they do which is probably another reason many people flocked there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Open Collective is a funding platform unaffiliated with l.w

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're absolutely right, I had completely misunderstood its involvement for some reason. Still, Ruud's experience in the Fediverse running mastodon.world gives me reason to believe lemmy.world will be reliable too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a little confused by your comment. What function does Open Collective serve other than simply as a fiscal host?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A reliable pipeline for donations, transparency and experience running large Fediverse servers (EDIT: list of Fediverse servers run by Ruud). You're right that they're not directly involved in running the server, I had misunderstood that and thought they were directly associated for some reason.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There is a very large range between tiny instance that can disappear overnight and "large instance". The large instances are actually more likely to disappear as their hosting costs are beyond what a small group of admins can pay out of their own pocket easily, so they vitally depend on donations and that can break down easily for many reasons.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven't seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I'm wrong).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There were certainly some that had to close registrations as their donation base was insufficient for the number of users trying to sign up. And others were sold to very questionable companies as they couldn't finance themselves otherwise.

But that wasn't my argument. We are talking about things that can go wrong with instances. Just because you didn't see any large instances go down in this "nice weather" period, doesn't mean they are resilient to serious shocks.

A small to medium sized instance that is basically run as a hobby by a few admins and is optimized for being cheap enough to not need donations is the much more sustainable and resilient instance.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Mine has existed for a few years now, so I'm fairly confident it'll exist for more

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The only instance in my country has "cult" as the 1st word in its name.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Philippenis moments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I suppose it’s not the Cult of the dead cow..?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Really good advice.

The more we decentralize, the less any one server needs to pull all the load.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

If someone's looking for an instance, feel free to use mine, lemmings.world. As a bonus, you can call yourself a lemming! It's hosted in Germany.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I started on lemmy.world but am currently writing this from discuss.online, a lemmy instance I found in the greater NYC area because that's where I'm based. It has the same access to all the communities and content that lemmy.world does and because it's nearby and has fewer users it's fast! Signing up and setting up my subscriptions only took a few minutes. I still have a lemmy.world account, but I don't need to use it all the time.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

lemmy.world was an instance I tried and call me an impatient spoiled brat, but it's not usable for me because it's so darn slow. It's much better to join a smaller instance. It doesn't even have to be in the country you're connecting from. sh.itjust.works is in Canada, I am in Western Europe, it's snappy AF. And less toxic btw. kbin.social is pretty awesome, though. Loads up for me nice and fast with more content I want to see. I've settled on kbin as my place to go, but there are other instances that are just as fantastic. The lesson I learned: lemmy.world might be the big general instance and it might wish to claim to be "the front page of the internet" but it's bogged down and too slow. It also wasn't fun for me when I could actually use it. You know, because of the usual. Too much bickering and too much meta stuff. It's much better to join the communities hosted on lemmy.world from another faster instance. You get snappier loading up of content and you avoid their whole home page which, at the moment, is just a meta victim.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I think the concerns about smaller instances are valid (as I post from lemmus.org). Some additional data points to consider when evaluating an instance would be whether they're running a recent version and the uptime of the instance.

It'd probably be a good idea to have a page that promotes these smaller instances that 'score' well to help distribute some of the load.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I’m gonna guess that just being on a less busy server will make the biggest difference. I moved from lemmy world and lemm.ee is super fast even though I’m pretty sure both are across the ocean from me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I've just discovered that kbin.social is near Wichita. Does that mean that ernest is John Rambo? 💪😎🤜

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If you're in central Europe, feel free to join mine!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So can I just start running my only instance on my home server and just let only a few friends use it, then federate with the rest?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wow, I did not expect there to be servers so close to me! Thanks for sharing this

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I tried to migrate to another instance by rejoining the same communities as this account. However I can't seem to find some of the communities anymore through the other instance's search page. There's no indication that there's any defederation going on.

I still have no idea what a proper community joining process is. I just go to the search page, type it in and scroll through the random comments until I find a link to a community.

If only I could just copy the community link, right now it'll just open up with lemmy.world again, so I have to go through the other instance's search page. Please let me know if there's a guide of any kind.

Edit: Ok you need to manually type the URLs. E.g. if you wanted to open this community on lemmy.ml, type "lemmy.ml/c/[email protected]"

That's a kinda clunky experience ngl. How is the average normie going to feel about appending URLs in the address bar tho.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Community discovery on Lemmy so far feels incredibly difficult. Even browsing "all" I feel I get the same 10-15 communities in rotation.

How am I supposed to find the medium-sized communities about specific subjects that don't end up on "all?"

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I would prefer if there was a way to ping every instance to find the fastest one. Like this: https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances/issues/12

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't understand personally why Lemmy.world isn't utilizing load balancing (specifically, horizontal load balancing). Is it due to budget concerns?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

There are challenges with horizontal scaling due to the way that Lemmy is architected. Sounds like this will be a priority for them to improve

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