Whether you are a Reddit refugee (I am one) or just randomly stumbled upon Lemmy and decided to join lemmy.world, welcome to the Fediverse.

If you have been here for long enough and settled in and now finally feel comfortable with Lemmy, I highly advice you to move to smaller instances. I just newly left Lemmy.world to join Lemm.ee.

We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance. This will benefit the admins of Lemmy.world a lot as they would not have to deal with such a high amount of users. It also leaves room for new users to join and have a good experience rather than an experience filled with server outages where they will give up on Lemmy.

  • cerevant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    322·
    1 year ago

    Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.

    Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.

    Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.

    • Jomn@jlai.luEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      It would still be better to have multiple “large” servers, instead of only one or two, which is currently the case. I really don’t think that it is a good thing to have a big difference between the biggest and the next biggest servers, as it effectively centralizes the content around the biggest instance.

      I however agree that it doesn’t make sense to have tons of tiny instances.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        I keep saying that the US needs to have its own big instance (or several) to host all those communities about US cities and sports teams that nobody else needs to care about, as well as potentially a good chunk of users and to exist as a large server alternative to lw.

        • SpziEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          People who see it this way are likely not from the US.

          People who could make it happen must be from the US.

          :-/

  • falseteefs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    23·
    1 year ago

    It is a good point but are people really joining lemmy.world en mass still and if so why don’t the admins close registrations?

    • MagneticFusionOPEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      That is a good point. Currently things have stabilized. But you never know what might cause another mass migration to Lemmy in the future, which will lead to every new account joining Lemmy.world.

    • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for sharing this! It seems that you are the only admin of your instance, do you plan to have a back up person?

      • Philip@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        It is on my to-do list, but it would take some work to add support for multiple people to have access to everything required and I would also need a lot more documentation, than I currently have.

        • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          That’s all good, you can take your time! I was just asking because usually that’s a deal breaker for potential joiners to see a one-person admin team

  • imnotneo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    191·
    1 year ago

    don’t see the benefit tbh. software will scale, or not, if not people will leave for others

  • infamousbelgian@waste-of.spaceEnglish
    181·
    1 year ago

    Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!

    Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.

      • infamousbelgian@waste-of.spaceEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        Hello there!

        I’m running Lemmy via Lemmy-easy-deploy on Hetzner (so self-hosted as in: via a provider). E-mail is working via smtp2go and is indeed active :)

  • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    One problem I foresee with smaller instances is discovery. As we know, if someone creates a new community somewhere else, your instance will onlyrecognise it once someone searches for it.

    On a large instance like lemmy.world, there’s a good chance that someone else did, and you can stumble upon it by browsing /all. On a smaller instance this may not happen unless it’s set up to discover and thus mirror every community everywhere.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    123·
    1 year ago

    We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance

    But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.

    If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.

    But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.

    • Lazylazycat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      1 year ago

      But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.

      • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        You may need to search for the community first for your instance to know about it. That hampers discovery a lot imo.

        • Lazylazycat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          Oh is that true? So when I search for an instance on the app I use (Connect) is the list of communities that appear only there because people have subscribed to them once? Or am I seeing everything but it won’t appear in everyone’s feed until I subscribe to it?

          • WhoRoger@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            They don’t have to subscribe, but somebody has to have searched specifically for that community, so kinda yes.

            People here promote scripts and bots so that an instance gets automatically subbed to new communities - which ok, but then which small instances really want to mirror the whole Fediverse? Most will run out of hard drive space, and we’re back at square one.

    • what_is_a_name@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.

      • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.

        • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s a good argument for bigger instances, but not one for using the largest one. Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works have more that 2k members, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com have 600 members, based on your argument their expected life expectantly is as long as Lemmy.world

  • slippery_salmons@lemmy.todayEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I moved to a smaller instance today. One thing that I’ve noticed that isn’t the same, is the Top All Time is showing different posts and vote counts on certain subs. I think I’ve noticed it only happens in the subs that I’ve interacted from the small instance for the first time. Or, if someone from my small instance interacted with it last week, there will be 7 days of history, but nothing beyond that. IDK if that’s true or not, just what I’ve observed today.

    I’ve subscribed to all the same communities as when I was on lemmy.world, but my feed seems slower and quieter.

  • topinambour_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I joined a local instance of mastodonte. I had days without being able to access my stuff, and finally recreated an account on the main mastodonte instance. So this time I directly picked a large instance.

    • astral_avocado@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I had similar issues, I joined a small Mastodon instance and for some reason couldn’t see comments or amounts of boosts. I guess it was just misconfigured

  • Vub@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    It is the strength and the weakness of it all.

    On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.

  • Venicon@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Just created my account on sopuli.xyz before I realised I could migrate the whole account from Lemmy.world but have had zero downtime since then so that’s a positive.

  • 1984@lemmy.todayEnglish
    81·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for making this post, I feel like it can’t be repeated enough. People sit on Lemmy.world instead of creating an account somewhere else where they can literally read and comment on previous posts from Lemmy.world, and then it all gets synked when it’s up again.

    It’s like email guys - the entire global email system doesn’t stop because your company email server has technical issues.

  • Eddie@lemmy.lucitt.socialEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    I started on lemmy.world, then decided to learn self-hosting server infrastructure and made my own instance. Found a script that allows me to “auto-discover” all communities from given instance URLs, so I just added the instances that interest me. Boom, I have an instance with all of my favorite instances searchable and discoverable on “All”.

    For those interested in the script you can find it here. Do note that you should NOT use the default settings and make sure to use an instance whitelist, otherwise it’ll pull every instance ever.