To the newcomers to the fediverse. Don’t let the last few days or even the next few be your only impression on this. When we all came over from twitter it was a shit show and nothing worked right because everything was overwhelmed. Give it a few days. It’ll get better.
It’s already improving, smaller communities becoming more active, which promotes faster federation across smaller server instances. the big guys are upgrading to faster servers, though I need to stress that people shouldn’t all just lump into the big servers, find a local one if you can.
Spreading out is definitely the way to make this thing work. I’m sure there is more that can be implemented to help with federation speed, making sure you have all comments, etc. Those are solved with a monolith instance, but as we see you need a monster server to do it. I think instances averaging less than a few thousand users each will be the way to move forward.
Yep, if we had a way to migrate users between instances (technically possible, but not implemented) there could possibly even be a way to shuffle users off overloaded servers automatically in the future, like a form of load balancing.
Allowing users to migrate as seamlessly as possible between instances is just an important part of making decentralization really effective too — it only really means something that it’s possible to move to a different instance with a different culture and set of rules, norms, moderation style, etc, without losing access to the network as a whole if it’s easy to do so, because only then does it become a real possibility for counterbalancing the power of any given instance.
Love that idea. Servers could distinguish if they want to be a general ‘home instance’ for users, and those that opt in could communicate with each other and push accounts around as necessary. Servers could calculate their likelihood to accept a new incoming account based on some heuristics the admin could set, with sensible defaults. That way the system would self-balance itself as new instances appear and as mature ones reach capacity. Of course for that to work there would have to be some central authority keeping track of account locations for login purposes.
That sort of functionality would be a long way off, but it would be very good for balance if the federation exchanges could be better optimised to make it more seamless.
The problem is that the entire point of instances is not just to spread the costs/load of hosting the network, but to allow people to find places where the culture and norms (and thus the moderation style and block lists) align with what they feel comfortable with, so they can rely on being able to find a place that will have a nice experience for them. For instance, I choose explicitly LGBTQ-friendly and anti authoritarian instances on the Fediverse. Automatically moving people around based on heuristics has the chance of really fucking that up for people. I don’t want to wake up one morning and find myself on an instance that federates with whatever rightwing shithole instance will crop up in the next few months and have to avoid the platform or be harassed with dick pics and transphobia.
Additionally, having a centralized server for anything kind of defeats the point, no?
I’ve been having a blast… I think this place is fully viable. QOL type polishing and some technical refinement sure but this is something special.
Same. The current state is perfectly serviceable for me, and I look forward to helping it grow to make it more viable for others.
And for some reason everyone (most) is really friendly, I used to lurk a lot on Reddit, here I can actually chat with people.
No doubt. It’s been incredibly refreshing!
Reddit turns everyone into assholes, myself included. It’s crazy.
Amen! This movement is far more about he actual implications of federation, not that it isn’t there yet. If we have any chance to live in a world not controlled by government/corporate greed, then we have to start trusting in one another and helping to support an internet that we all control and can take part in.
Here here
Any influx like this is a clusterfuck. It’s just the way it is. But this community already feels good. And it seems like those on the backend are doing everything they can. So patience it is, because this could be great.
I love being a part of something that isn’t extremely large. All of the issues I’ve been having just add to the charm. I don’t care if everything doesn’t work right away. I enjoy lemmy because it is open source.
Like 2 days ago, it seems to have reached such a critical mass of popularity that once I set my feed from “local” to “all”, I can just keep scrolling down and continue seeing new content. This is now sustainable for me and I can happily quit reddit for good as long as lemmy stays this popular.
Same for me. I’ve already found communities for most of the subreddits I liked. Though I’m having trouble subscribing to the dwarf fortress one since it won’t show up in my search results for some reason.
Here here!
even if it doesn’t get better in the coming days, i have hope that it will get better steadily over time. the fact that recent events have given the concept of federation more publicity is a step in the right direction. when the social media giants inevitably screw over their users again in the future, more people will know where to look for better alternatives.
Agree. There have been some hiccups, but nothing that has made it unusable. I appreciate everyone working to keep the site/s up, resize servers, mods, app developers. Also, thanks to the long-time Lemmy users for putting up with the onslaught of newbies overwhelming their space. Everyone has been friendly, and I hope we Reddit refugees can be good neighbors.
I’m just happy I made it.
it took me 2 days to figure out how to join communities on other instances - maybe there’s documentation for it but it wasnt obvious, I had to work it out, trial and error style. loved it! felt like I accomplished something.
reddit was too easy to use, it spoiled us to an extent.
How do you join communities in other instances? The only thing that worked for me was typing the [email protected] into the search on the website which is a hassle. I also haven’t found a way to do the same in the app.
yeah that’s how I’ve been doing it, tried it on the app and couldnt figure it out, then the app forgot my password so I uninstalled it and now just use the web version on my phone (there should be an “install” option for the site - I prefer chrome so i dont have to remember passwords). the same process works there but it’s cumbersome, easier to do on a pc
Does this momentary overload impact the feed across instances? I was testing it today and was getting different feeds on different instances, even though I had the same settings (‘all’, active, hot, new comments, etc.). I had the impression that the ‘all’ feed would be the same in every instance, considering that they are federating somewhat the same instances.
It can. If another instance is having issues you might have trouble accessing the content on their server.
I hope they will fix NSFW content plopping up on the “All” feed. Currently feddit.de decided to ban my lemmynsfw instance, because they didn’t want the content mirrored on their sites and not flood the All frontpage. But it means I cannot interact with that instance for a technical flaw than bad policing.
That’s interesting because user can opt to not see NSFW content and that server is really good about making sure things are marked appropriately.
I hope you are right, so far it’s pretty clunky. I am here either way, as going back does not appear to be an option. However, the fediverse updating is taking on way more resources than I think the owners of these instances thought. Ours is updating with x5 more servers. I suspect that will help.
