So after we’ve extended the virtual cloud server twice, we’re at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.
Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.
So the bad news… we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )
For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon
Thanks!
Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores “Rome” CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.
I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it’s back. After that I’ll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.
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Wow that was fast.
Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the “worse” parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!
how nice people seem here
yes! I love the culture of this place so far
Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.
Which is a very good thing, because that’s what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it’s relying on donations for funding, I believe?
undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.
People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don’t worry, you’ll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.
Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.
Yeah, we can enjoy while it lasts, because with more users more questionable content will come
Found one russian troll already. Oh well…
Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.
you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again
wow, that’s actually a really nice feature. I wonder how it works though, i guess their text just will be blacked out for me, or will the post and all answers to it be completely vanish?
They’re only invisible to you, it’s kind of like muting on Twitter more than blocking, as far as I understood. (I haven’t felt the need to do it yet!)
Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there’s a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol
What.
what about that post made you think they were a russian troll?
I think they meant they’ve seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.
I … Have to assume so, anyway
Can confirm I am not a russian troll ;)
I think they meant they’ve seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.
I … Have to assume so, anyway
that’s what I assumed, but was trying to understand all the downvotes
So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?
And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?
I’m a newbie from Reddit too, but your understanding matches mine.
Yes, lemmy.world, lemmy.film, beebaw and etc are other instances of Lemmy and users from other instances can interact with other instances.
And yes donations help the server afloat.
Pretty cool stuff.
Awesome, thank you for this information. I hope you have a great week!
That is correct. I’ve signed up for monthly donations to help cover costs (as well as added tip to help the admins themselves).
“Lemmy instances” are analogous to “email servers”: your account is hosted on one of them, but you can communicate with people on other ones, because the servers know how to talk to each other.
Expanding the capacity of the Lemmy service will involve both (1) more instances, and (2) more resources for existing instances.
That’s right.
For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate… My friend gave me a great explanation:
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Lemmy the platform is planet Earth
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“Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth
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When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country
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If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community
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When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from
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Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately
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c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it’s c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]
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Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.
Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit
To add to this, you can use exclamation point “!” To link people to communities in a way that won’t take them away from their home instance. Likewise you can use @ for users.
Example: [email protected] Or: @[email protected]
It even auto fills when you type
Edit: might be wrong about it linking universally.
This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.
Making links agnostic is an open PR which will be implemented eventually.
I’m working on a Firefox extension to add a link going to your home instance.
for a while it will result in a lot of seemingly dead links as small communities will appear as 404s until the remote instance has synced.
Or at least that’s what i’m seeing occasionally when I try to copy/paste the communites onto my instances /c/ URL.
right I was just testing it and it auto fills with absolute path using “!”. Using “@” I could only link local communities
This seems like a much better explanation for Lemmy compared to the email analogy everyone writes for non-tech savvy people.
Welp, tbh the dude is a pro at making a molehill out of a mountain
Is there a way to view C/Memes in all instances at once in aggregate? I don’t want to miss out on what other instances are doing.
Not yet, although there is ongoing discussion about this
I’m new here so I might not be asking the right question. As I understand it there are many subforums one on each instance with the same exact name. Are they all shown at once while browsing? Can they be?
I wasn’t talking about multiforums but that’s good to know too.
There can be multiple communities with the same name, that doesn’t mean there are. Like how [email protected] and [email protected] are the same “name” but a different domain.
So say for example you and your friend start up your own Lemmy instance and decide to make your own community called “Funny” where you can post jokes, without bothering to check if there was already a more popular “Funny” in someone else’s instance. There’s nothing stopping you and now there will be two communities called Funny, but one would be [email protected] and yours would be [email protected]
If your “Funny” gets to be really popular too, then other people might choose to subscribe to both Funny communities, and then posts from both would be in their feed. However they are distinctly seperate and you will continue to own and run yours and lemmy.world would own theirs.
Does that make sense? I know it’s a weird concept when you’re used to unique names in Reddit, but it’s not all that different from r/news and r/worldnews covering similar content but controlled by different people.
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I’m not sure how its being done as far as the technical aspects but Ruud has done a great job as admin upgrading the servers to keep up and anticipating the flow of new users.
The same admin also has experience with a mastadon.world server that experienced lots of growth from Twitter users leaving over musk moves. So essentially we have a good admin as far as I can tell and it’s not his first rodeo. Part of the reason I chose this server
I’m less concerned with the technical aspects and more curious about the long term.
Federated instances, such as lemmy.world, are operated by individuals; What happens if they decide to stop doing so without handing the server/data off to someone else? Do all of our accounts created here disappear? What do other users see if they click through my profile from a post on a different federated server? What happens to all of the content created on the server in question?
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It would be gone.
The federated design has got people already thinking about it though. It’s inevitable that some instances will just close without notice. So people are trying to figure out the best way to handle it, from archiving/mirroring to creating an export account feature.
It’s very early days and the projects will be developed quite extensively I imagine, this is a chance for some people like myself to contribute to new features and make a real impact on its future.
12k ??? That’s crazy! It was only 500 when I joined 6 days ago, wow!
No worries for the downtime, when it’s needed, it’s needed :)
probably mostly due to the reddit situation. at least thats why im here now
May Reddit crash and burn. I’m part of the reddit exodus and the look of Lemmy is close to what I used to get in RedditIsFun (RiF). Going to take some getting used to but so far so good.
Same. I’m just using this on Opera on mobile and it’s just the same as RIF. Loving it so far!
I’m glad to hear about the new users (I myself am one.) and the server upgrades!
I think lemmy.world suits me better than Beehaw. (great folks over there, no shade)
I like that lemmy.world let’s communities be openly created by users, as well as the inclusion of downvoting which I personally prefer.
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That is a good way to put it! Yeah, I can totally appreciate what they’re doing over there, but I’m excited to have lemmy.world be where I call home now.
I’m using Fedia. How do I add lemmy.world so I can see posts from there?
I hope not all people will go back to reddit as soon as the communities go public again.
The two day blackout was what finally got me to actually look into the fediverse, figure out servers and whatnot, and make an account to try it out. I’ve been meaning to look into it for a while, but the blackout was the push I needed. I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m far more interested in exploring this exciting new space then I am going back to the garbage filled Reddit, even if they miraculously back down on the API changes .
My reddit account was over 10 years old. This is my first comment on Lemmy/Fediverse.
Relate. 12 year account, would like to see this take off. They’re not changing.
I will stay here. Did not have this feeling of internet independence for a very long time. I’m done with Reddit.
I’m just gonna browse both for a while I guess. I know I’m not downloading the official app on my phone though
I’m gonna browse Reddit occasionally as well due to its large back content, albeit with adblocks and privacy extensions up and running, but I will only post here. Might be a good idea to mirror anything I end up referring to on Reddit.
Iirc somebody is working on a mirror system. I’ll try find it but it’s on Reddit somewhere.
I know I won’t!
I don’t plan on it. RIF was my main way of browsing Reddit so once that goes, that’s pretty much me done. I’ll probably still peruse sysadmin for work purposes, but my Reddit time will become Lemmy time.
I am in a transition period where I still keep Apollo installed, and trying to find enough communities here in order to be somewhat ready for the July 🙈
I have deleted nearly 10 years worth of content and account already. Those leaving should do the same.
I’m more or less getting what I wanted out of reddit out of lemmy already. There are a few teething pains, but overall it reminds me of the nice little community we had at reddit in 2007. It got better and better until about 2012 after the big digg migration where it started to peak and devolve. I would love to relive those first 5 years here again. I don’t miss reddit at all.
Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there’s a good way to predict load based on number of users.
Yes. It’s called performance testing. Basically an engineer would need to setup test user transactions to simulate live traffic and load test the system to see how everything scales, where it breaks, etc. Then you can use the results of the tests to figure out how big of an instance you should use for your projected number of users.
Jmeter, and locust.io are the two biggest open source performance test tools.
The alternative is take a wild guess. See how the system behaves, and make adjustments in real time… like what @[email protected] is currently doing.
Worth noting that typical app scaling does not scale linearly, and hardware caps out at some point (with diminishing returns up to that point) - federation will help with that much cheaper where normally a company would just have to throw more money at more servers themselves :)
Yup. You don’t have to explain that to me. It’s funny when folks assume:
if I double the servers, I’ll get twice the throughput!
Just throw servers at it! It’ll magically sort itself out!
Yeah, I meant specific data using lemmy.world as a datum, not the theoretical “check and see if you guessed right” method.
Lemmy.world is fantastic, thanks for your efforts. It fit perfectly with all the criteria I had when choosing where to host my account.
That being said, I wish Lemmy.ml, the “main” Lemmy instance, more often registered communities created here. At the moment, most people just search for communities there and many of our own don’t show up because no user from that instance interacted with our new and growing communities just yet - not only does this create a fragmentation issue, but given the massive load spike, Lemmy.ml is actually running a bit slow whereas Lemmy.world is handling posts better, making interaction easier specially when migrating users from Reddit or other places. For instance, my GameBoy community is ready, with users, and I’m about to post some good content - but as far as someone from Lemmy.ml is concerned, no such community exists.
My take on this is that we have to remember how much this massive influx of users has been the last few days. Significantly more than its entire history. There is also the learning curve of new users. I think as people start getting a handle on how the fediverse works this will be less of an issue. Overtime this should work itself out. My two cents anyway. BTW also just subbed to c/Gameboy ;)
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lemmy.ml is having massive infra issues because it was one of the more linked-to instances in the past. I think it’ll probably start easing up now that other instances are soaking users up.
Well, when I search for a community, the results span servers, so I can find and join wherever. It is possible the search feature only includes servers previously referenced, I don’t know.
If no one has joined that community before you need to search it with the format
!community@instanceSo how to we solve this? Create a user on .ml and subscribe to the .world community? Or is it enough to just search it up once to it “sees” the other community?
I can’t seem to get [email protected] to work from lemmy.ml either so 🤷🏻♂️
You only need one account on one instance (except if you’re trying to access something that’s blocked).
Just to confirm, you’re putting that in the search bar? Make sure to wait a few seconds; it might say “no results” at first before it finds it.
Once a person does that and joins, everyone else on lemmy.ml should be able to find mycommunity
I tried looking up this community as well from a couple of different instances and it’s not showing up.
Looking up lemmyworld works for me, but norge doesn’t. I have no idea then. Maybe the servers are overloaded now.
undefined> norge
was there a solution to norge? I’m trying to subscribe to it from SDF but I can’t find it
also everything is so damn slow right now, it’s taking me 5 minutes to reply to you
Hace you tried with the full url? https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyworld that have worked for me every time. But sometimes is it a bit slower
That’s not working either it seems.
I tried to look for norge on lemmy.ml and it’s not showing up for me either
Maybe it hasn’t synced yet? I don’t know, try later I guess 🫤
What’s the operating cost? Thank you, for running this server! :)
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Awesome to see so much growth. I just joined yesterday and I guess I’m not alone!
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I really appreciate what you’re doing, but I’m worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to “just join a new instance 4head” and that just…doesn’t have a good experience.
This server can easily host 1M users.
Most stress on the server comes from all the signups and newcomers posting a lot. After a while that becomes less. On Mastodon, the first days in November I had over 100k active users. Now I have 165k accounts but around 32k active.
And I’m sure the Lemmy devs will also improve the performance of the site. They never really had to, a few days ago the total number of Lemmy users over all instances was 7k.
Is data actually replicated among the different servers? Is (data from other servers) just cached temporarily or is it permanently stored on local DBs?
I checked lemmy docs but I couldn’t find a clear answer.
I was wondering what kind of strain the immense influx of people could put on network and DBs other than just servers, specifically in case of the number of servers raising a lot, not just users on a single server.
Ya what are the limitations with scaling horizontally? Scaling up is a stop gap.
Ruud, thank you for your investment here though.
