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!

  • SkidFace@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1031·
    2 years ago

    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!

    • impulse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • bandario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        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.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again

        • thorle@feddit.deEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          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?

          • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            2 years ago

            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!)

      • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there’s a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol

        • bobaduk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          171·
          2 years ago

          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

        • bobaduk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          2 years ago

          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

  • delaghetto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    53·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      2 years ago

      That is correct. I’ve signed up for monthly donations to help cover costs (as well as added tip to help the admins themselves).

    • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      “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.

  • notsorryforpartying@lemmy.worldEnglish
    45·
    2 years ago

    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

    • prototypeByDesign@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • stankmut@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Sens@feddit.ukEnglish
          14·
          2 years ago

          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.

  • Cool Beance@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    2 years ago

    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:

    • Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

    • “Instances” like lemmyworld, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

    • When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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

    • 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/memes@lemmy.ml

    • 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

      • andrew@radiation.partyEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.

          • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            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.

        • ioNabio@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          right I was just testing it and it auto fills with absolute path using “!”. Using “@” I could only link local communities

    • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      This seems like a much better explanation for Lemmy compared to the email analogy everyone writes for non-tech savvy people.

    • slopecarver@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • slopecarver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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.

          • foggenbooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            There can be multiple communities with the same name, that doesn’t mean there are. Like how yourname@gmail.com and yourname@hotmail.com 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 Funny@lemmy.world and yours would be Funny@whateveryoupicked.com

            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.

  • Lermatroid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!

    Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.

    • Targox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      I’ll give it a shot! Edit: love the fact that click to collapse is back. No search bar, account info and the occasional crash but the feed looks great! Looking forward to future updates

    • solidsnake911@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      2 years ago

      iOS only? Or also Android? Btw, you receive notifications on Jerboa? What do you use for Lemmy on Android?

  • IowaMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Saturn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • dystop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 years ago

    I’m not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn’t seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?

  • novettam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    2 years ago

    Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn’t work at all, hindering community discovery.

    Thanks!

  • ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    161·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Slashzero@hakbox.socialEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • andrew@radiation.partyEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        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 :)

        • Slashzero@hakbox.socialEnglish
          0·
          2 years ago

          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!

      • ZeeKay@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, I meant specific data using lemmy.world as a datum, not the theoretical “check and see if you guessed right” method.