What would be the best thing to do to help keep lemmy.world up? Donate? Servers? What is the best way to help?
Best I can do is upload memes and add to the load.
That’s actually not a terrible idea. Lemmy really needs content. It doesn’t necessarily matter what that content is, it Is just really starving for activity in general. So anything that you post is a huge help.
Lemmy needs content. Lemmy.world needs resources or even just for people to spread out into other instances. It’s the fediverse after all. You don’t even need to have or use Lemmy to enjoy Lemmy content.
Move to a different instance to spread the load. You can see all the same content from any other instance, but the experience will be a lot better with less lag.
Lemmy is not the same as lemmy.world.
The problem with lemmy.ml and lemmy.world is that they are just too popular and instances don’t scale well.
I don’t understand how a million tiny instances is supposed to scale better than a few big instances.
Caching all the data from another instance is overhead. If you’re not serving that to enough people, your instance is going to create more traffic than it reduces.
1-10 person instances can’t possibly help. Maybe 10,000 users on an instance is valuable for scaling.
There are certain things that are memory intensive and CPU intensive. If you have 10k on one server doing that it really adds up. However having them across a wide range of smaller servers, its not such a big deal.
As a user, you literally lose out on nothing not being on lemmy.world. You can partake in all the same conversations, communities and everything. In fact when lemmy.world is down, you can still see everything and when it comes back up, your posts will synchronize. There’s genuinely no upside to being on lemmy.world. That’s the way the system was designed.
I would indeed say 1000-5000 users instance should be the soft spot. Having a look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and filter by 1m (monthly active users) shows that 27k are on Lemmy.world, while Lemmy.ml is second with only 3,8k.
A healthier solution would be to have all the small instances (imagine the 25 biggest, so up to Lemmy.zip) to gain users, so that LW would be less critical
Is there any functional difference between 4 people funding and running 1 instances vs 4 people funding and running 4 instances?
You can see all the same content from any other instance
Nah. I moved from ml to world to .ca, and .ca is the best. I didn’t realize how much content ml and world defederated from. I love it on .ca
Helpful trick, if you go to [any instance url]/instances (for example https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances ) it will show all the instances it is federated and defederated with. (Use your browser’s find in page feature to scroll down to the “blocked instances” section)
I moved from lemmy.ml to unilemmy who specifically don’t defederate from anyone. So they treat people as adults who can decide for themselves what they want to see. If you don’t like something just block it … simple.
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The cost quickly adds up for small underfunded projects though. You also need to factor in how the application does scale. What kind of ingress/load balancing is required. What kind of stateful storage is required. Network policy. Resource monitoring. Config management, CI/CD pipeline. I setup a basic cluster on gke to start but haven’t gotten around to building these just yet. I’ve got a goal of attempting the most performant, scalable, and cheapest instance out there.
Spread out to one of the other 1300 instances maybe?
Fediverse means federated. Not one instance.
Donating to lemmy.world because it has become too big seems like a self inflicted problem.
If I create an account on a small instance and that instance shuts down, will I not lose my account and post history?
Yes. This is one of the risks picking a small instance. On the other hand, all instances were small once. Most still are. And you should help them grow instead of sitting on the largest one.
Instances that grow are much less likely to shut down. I only know a few instances that have shut down actually, so I don’t think it’s a large risk. We wouldn’t have 1300 instances if they would shut down often.
I know it’s only been a few months since Lemmy got a lot of new users. So we will see how it plays out. But for a healthy Lemmy ecosystem, there should be hundreds of active instances with lots of people.
Honestly, everyone not joining lemmy.world would help. Also, not confusing Lemmy and lemmy.world as the same thing. If you have an alt account on another server, consider making it your permanent account. It’s the fediverse. You don’t need to be on lemmy.world to see lemmy.world.
Honestly having a list of what makes instances different would help. I have two lemmy accounts right now and figuring out which instance to pick after Limmy.world is tough.
And I only want maximum federation. I’m willing to do my own moderation and curation, just not hosting. Though that may come later if needed.
I’m really happy at Lemmy.today - federates with everyone, no downvotes and fast instance. Just needs more users.
federates with everyone
Redflag. What country is it hosted in?
This one is in western USA. Why is it a red flag?
The vlemmy situation. Just make sure they defederate instances hosting things illegal in their home state.
What happened to it? I thought they just lost their ml domain.
Vlemmy was .net
They federated with an instance that was hosting content that was illegal in the country vlemmy was hosted in.