This could be a concern but i think it will even out in the end. Many people will naturally gravitate to am instance that suites them. I created unilem.org as an instance aimed at not defederating. Some will like that and join others will not and find a different place that suits them. Its the beauty of the fediverse. You can choose your home or even host your own.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
The more the merrier. I want the doctors from askdocs and the historians and the eli5 people and the lawyers from legaladvice etc etc to be here too. Currently it’s mainly us tech nerds who understand how the fediverse works. Which is nice at times but having a wide range of nerds from many fields would be great
IDK but if, say, Motörhead came to a 50 seat library in some small town it would be kinda cute and would make the library famous, and it would make all other libraries envy them in a good way.
Edit: just learned that Lemmy died 8 years ago. Just imagine I said Imagine Dragons or something…
When Bush were at the height of their success, I saw them in a little 300 person room. It was brilliant and we should appreciate Lemmy while it is in that state.
allow me to introduce you to https://lemmy.world/c/tonightsdinner it’s pretty much that except playing in the empty back room of the library - cooks come and post please
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
I’m kind of enjoying the smaller community size. Unlike reddit where I’d come across a post that I have something interesting to say about and see there are already 27,481 comments.
It certainly has it’s ups and downs. It’s nice having smaller communities as it really helps having more congenial conversations, but I do miss the larger user base sometimes, since it ensures more coverage of a given topic.
Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.
Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
Maybe look into borg and https://www.borgbase.com/ - they give 10gb free. I sat it up for some important data I would want to keep if utter disaster struck yesterday, and was pretty straight forward.
If you’re asking what the $6 gets, I’m talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn’t sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don’t know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.
At the moment, just communities. I thought about letting people make accounts, and might still do it, but I don’t want the responsibility until I’m sure the system is reliable without much extra work. It seems like the lemmy.world people are running into a lot of problems.
It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name
My man, you are getting absolutely bent over a barrel by your registrar. You could get that domain significantly cheaper at a place like Porkbun or Namecheap.
I actually use namecheap. It’s only a few bucks first year, but .world domains cost $31.98 per year after that. So not $35 like I remembered, but pretty close. Or maybe that is the price with tax.
However, if I wanted a .nl domain, it’s only $7.98 per year. Looking at other domains, it’s crazy, but .inc is $2198 per year.
Gotcha. I’m actually in the process of moving away from Namecheap because of an experience I just had with them. I tried to register a domain about a month ago (the domain my Lemmy instance is on) and it stopped the registration process immediately after I hit the Pay/Checkout/whatever button and told me to contact their support team to register it.
The error message said it was because the domain name was too similar to something that already existed, and that the support team would have to decide whether I’d be allowed to register it or not. So I went to another registrar and registered it with no issue. I really didn’t like that, and it’s enough to make them lose me as a decade+ long customer. I already use Route53 for DNS for all my domains, so it’s not like I was using them for anything else other than a registrar, so untangling that shouldn’t be too much of a pain.
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Unless there’s an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It’s also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
Unfortunately, Reddit and Twitter going shitty this year just reminded me that the Internet on the whole is only 30-some years old and things are still fleeting. I think it’s unreasonable to expect any one center of discussion or any particular service to be around forever.
This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:
Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation
I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.
Right now the process for me finding a new community is find the community, go to the search page in my browser, type in the community, search for it, wait for it to show up, and sub to it, restart my app. That sucks.
Everyone here by now knows how to find a community. Getting to that community fucking sucks.
You left out the 20% or so chance the subscribe button just doesn’t work. Also the 30% chance you find a community with 1 active user and less than 5 posts total, none of which point to a functioning community with a slightly different name.
Never underestimate the importance of convenience and the lack of work most people will do in most circumstances— and I’m not even blaming those people. A third-party tool will never catch on the way a built-in, organic convenience will.
My bad if I made you think I took it as something negative, I just meant my comment to reinforce what you’re saying. Because you’re right, we’ll do it, normies won’t.
Hmm, would be great if there was a like a nice, accessible list of these things for new users - tools and the like - and a link to that list was available on the Sign-up screen, right across Lemmy…
Would certainly go some way to reducing the friction between starting and knowing what you’re doing.
Maybe some content in cache. Not photos for sure. I’m not sure how exactly will this look like, but we can observe vlemmy.net as example, as it seems to be permanently down.
Lemmy.ml is hosted by the maintainers and Lemmy.world is the biggest instance (because they were one of the few that didn’t restrict sign ups when Reddit API went dark) so those users are going to have the most communities.
Despite this I still am subbed to many communities on beehaw, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.it.just.works
And I have some subbed communities on smaller instances.
But I will say that I’m thinking of starting a new community but I’ll probably do it on Lemmy.world as they have the funds and manpower to guarantee uptime
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
Edit: Meant to reply to the person concerned about the centralization of communities.
Even just a cronjob or scheduled task to download the backups to a machine at another location would be a big improvement. Then you can do it far more often because it’s automated.
But personally I like to have both a copy on a PC and a cloud backup, in addition to the server.
Then just back up the other files in the volumes directory where Lemmy is installed (everything except postgres, which is what the database dump does).
The pictrs volume includes both the uploaded images and the image cache. I have no idea how to separate out the uploaded images so you don’t have to back up the cache, I just back it all up.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it’s related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
Posts must be on topic.
Be respectful of others.
Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
This could be a concern but i think it will even out in the end. Many people will naturally gravitate to am instance that suites them. I created unilem.org as an instance aimed at not defederating. Some will like that and join others will not and find a different place that suits them. Its the beauty of the fediverse. You can choose your home or even host your own.
How’s not defederating going so far?
Well its only a new instance but no problems so far.
Thank you for sharing this.
I’ve been looking for an instance that protects free speech.
Edit: It would be nice if we could sign up without giving a rationale.
The explanation box is more just to prevent bots, once im confident that the captcha is working as intended I’ll likely remove it
c/showerthoughts
True, but since it’s about the Fediverse and Lemmy, this was a better fit.
For sure! Just sharing a community you can cross-post to, or inspire others to subscribe to if they like this type of post.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Good to know!
That is good since we are all beta testing the site and developing tools to manage everything before the real migration occurs.
Real migration? Who would be migrating? The 90% we left behind?
No, thank you.
The more the merrier.
You can move to smaller universes if that’s what you see fit.
No, in this case, the more is not the merrier. Otherwise you end up with the reddit shitshow.
You can choose to be on smaller instances that only federate with smaller instances.
Having more people gives us more options.
Fair enough.
Eventually more will come.
Can we gate keep the riffraff out? For once?
The more the merrier. I want the doctors from askdocs and the historians and the eli5 people and the lawyers from legaladvice etc etc to be here too. Currently it’s mainly us tech nerds who understand how the fediverse works. Which is nice at times but having a wide range of nerds from many fields would be great
Ah, when you put it this way, it makes sense.
I just don’t wante the usual pokemon or sponge bob memes flooding the fediverse.
IDK but if, say, Motörhead came to a 50 seat library in some small town it would be kinda cute and would make the library famous, and it would make all other libraries envy them in a good way.
Edit: just learned that Lemmy died 8 years ago. Just imagine I said Imagine Dragons or something…
But they’re not Lemmy. :-\
I will imagine Imagine Dragons.
Small communities and slow content feeds are fine for me I think. Either way I’m glad I’m here to witness this liminal period.
👍
hey its like our own little MTV Unplugged session :D
When Bush were at the height of their success, I saw them in a little 300 person room. It was brilliant and we should appreciate Lemmy while it is in that state.
Wow, what an amazing privilege.
You’re talking about Kate Bush, right?
No, rock band Bush.
allow me to introduce you to https://lemmy.world/c/tonightsdinner it’s pretty much that except playing in the empty back room of the library - cooks come and post please
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected]
Well done, robot - I’m still learning thank you!
Good bot!
Bot!
I don’t cook but I’ll support your cause.
I’m kind of enjoying the smaller community size. Unlike reddit where I’d come across a post that I have something interesting to say about and see there are already 27,481 comments.
It certainly has it’s ups and downs. It’s nice having smaller communities as it really helps having more congenial conversations, but I do miss the larger user base sometimes, since it ensures more coverage of a given topic.
Or that topic is covered in general.
Yes, Reddit feels more like information overload platform to me, even ur limit it with subscribe page only.
…the other 50 who showed up had to stand in the hall or not get in at all. They said the venue sucks and left.
Why is that?
A lot of people ran into signup and login issues over the last few weeks and just bailed.
“The system overwhelmed by this influx of new users is experiencing problems that make it take more than three seconds to get something done. Bye.”
WTF, I’m not going anywhere. I’ve been trying to help frustrated people on /r/Lemmy and /r/Redditalternatives. What have you done to help?
Lol, I was imitating the people who left after two seconds because of the problems.
Edit: added quotation marks for clarification
It was a natural filter. Good for the community quality, possibly.
i personally am surprised you got past the lemmy.world captcha
I once saw Yo-Yo Ma perform at a Borders book store in Boston.
They’re just doing their part for decentralized social media.
If their fans love them enough, they’ll make an account.
And the old memes trend is that time the band did a bunch of coffee shop shows playing nothing but ukuleles.
Only thing that bothers me is that most of the biggest communities are @ lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, so it still feels kind of centralized.
Obviously it’s not, but I wonder if too much “power” in one instance will have some negative consequences in future. For example one of them going black results in losing half of lemmy content and orphaned users probably won’t spread to smaller instances but will join next biggest.
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
deleted by creator
Maybe look into borg and https://www.borgbase.com/ - they give 10gb free. I sat it up for some important data I would want to keep if utter disaster struck yesterday, and was pretty straight forward.
You could also set up a more ghetto time machine like rsync with https://github.com/laurent22/rsync-time-backup if you have a machine on your network with ssh access from outside.
Is it open like an instance or is it for hosting communities only?
If you’re asking what the $6 gets, I’m talking about a single shard which allows me to host a Linux instance that runs a Lemmy instance. I wasn’t sure if that was sufficient, but honestly, the performance via Jerboa is better than when I was using an account on lemmy.world. It has only been a week, so don’t know how much disk will get used up over time. Long term I might need to bump things up for storage.
Oh, I meant would people be able to make accounts on it? Or is it purely for hosting communities?
At the moment, just communities. I thought about letting people make accounts, and might still do it, but I don’t want the responsibility until I’m sure the system is reliable without much extra work. It seems like the lemmy.world people are running into a lot of problems.
My man, you are getting absolutely bent over a barrel by your registrar. You could get that domain significantly cheaper at a place like Porkbun or Namecheap.
I actually use namecheap. It’s only a few bucks first year, but .world domains cost $31.98 per year after that. So not $35 like I remembered, but pretty close. Or maybe that is the price with tax.
However, if I wanted a .nl domain, it’s only $7.98 per year. Looking at other domains, it’s crazy, but .inc is $2198 per year.
Gotcha. I’m actually in the process of moving away from Namecheap because of an experience I just had with them. I tried to register a domain about a month ago (the domain my Lemmy instance is on) and it stopped the registration process immediately after I hit the Pay/Checkout/whatever button and told me to contact their support team to register it.
The error message said it was because the domain name was too similar to something that already existed, and that the support team would have to decide whether I’d be allowed to register it or not. So I went to another registrar and registered it with no issue. I really didn’t like that, and it’s enough to make them lose me as a decade+ long customer. I already use Route53 for DNS for all my domains, so it’s not like I was using them for anything else other than a registrar, so untangling that shouldn’t be too much of a pain.
That’ll all even out much in the same way the users evened out.
I was against it at first, but there’s probably a lot of value in communities spinning up their own domains and hosting their own focused communities. Instead of a central Lemmy.world which hosts many different communities, we should have lemmyPics.com and lemmyMusic.com and MaleFashionAdvice.com that all run Lemmy software, and then people can subscribe in from remote instances easily.
There’s still a place for general instances in this model too, but I think these communities might get off the ground easier with a $12 domain name and cloud hosting services than trying to all be the next Reddit.
Unless there’s an easy way to migrate a community to another instance, half of those will just go dark in a year or two when the admin gets bored. It’s also going to make updates suck when a breaking change happens and you have a month of admins getting around to updating.
Unfortunately, Reddit and Twitter going shitty this year just reminded me that the Internet on the whole is only 30-some years old and things are still fleeting. I think it’s unreasonable to expect any one center of discussion or any particular service to be around forever.
This is true, but there are good reasons it’s shaking out this way:
Lemmy.world has had some of the most open signups compared to other major instances
Discovery of communities across instances is a little harder, specifically natural discovery instead of directly searching
It is easier to just tell incoming users to sign on to the instance your community is hosted on because you know it’s safe and they won’t ever be locked out by defederation
I think the rise of more topic-specfiic instances like ttrpg.network will help spread the load out.
Natural discovery needs to be worked on.
just spread knowledge about tools like this https://lemmyverse.net/
just raise awareness about tools like this one https://lemmyverse.net/
Right now the process for me finding a new community is find the community, go to the search page in my browser, type in the community, search for it, wait for it to show up, and sub to it, restart my app. That sucks.
Everyone here by now knows how to find a community. Getting to that community fucking sucks.
You left out the 20% or so chance the subscribe button just doesn’t work. Also the 30% chance you find a community with 1 active user and less than 5 posts total, none of which point to a functioning community with a slightly different name.
Never underestimate the importance of convenience and the lack of work most people will do in most circumstances— and I’m not even blaming those people. A third-party tool will never catch on the way a built-in, organic convenience will.
It’s not even that I won’t do the work, I will. It’s just a shitty experience is all.
I don’t mean you specifically, friend. I’m just talking about the general (but not absolute, obviously) nature of people. But yee.
My bad if I made you think I took it as something negative, I just meant my comment to reinforce what you’re saying. Because you’re right, we’ll do it, normies won’t.
Hmm, would be great if there was a like a nice, accessible list of these things for new users - tools and the like - and a link to that list was available on the Sign-up screen, right across Lemmy…
Would certainly go some way to reducing the friction between starting and knowing what you’re doing.
I also think that something like LCS or Lemmony should be recommended and/or included in the default Lemmy
docker composefile.That way, when new Lemmy servers get spun up, they will automatically get seeded with content and communities from other existing Lemmy servers.
But all the other federated instances will have an duplicate of certain posts/comments, right?
Maybe some content in cache. Not photos for sure. I’m not sure how exactly will this look like, but we can observe vlemmy.net as example, as it seems to be permanently down.
So, matrix has the concept of aliases for channels/rooms. ActivityPub should do something similar for communities.
https://spec.matrix.org/latest/#room-aliases
Lemmy.ml is hosted by the maintainers and Lemmy.world is the biggest instance (because they were one of the few that didn’t restrict sign ups when Reddit API went dark) so those users are going to have the most communities.
Despite this I still am subbed to many communities on beehaw, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml and sh.it.just.works
And I have some subbed communities on smaller instances.
But I will say that I’m thinking of starting a new community but I’ll probably do it on Lemmy.world as they have the funds and manpower to guarantee uptime
Isnt text content stored by servers that are federated with those big instances so if they go down the content is still accessible?
It’s still accessible but new comments/votes won’t go through properly anymore
This is a concern, but luckily this isn’t required. I set up hobbit.world to host my Tolkien related communities. It only costs $6 a month plus the $35/yr for the domain name to host a tiny instance like this. I don’t need to depend on anyone but my hosting provider.
To be safe I should download backups once a month or so.
But the point is that for big communities that people put a lot of time into, there should be an instance for each one owned by one of the mods.
Edit: Meant to reply to the person concerned about the centralization of communities.
Please do it more often if you have users other than yourself. One backup on the same server is barely a backup at all.
Fair enough. I’ll look into automating it using some sort of storage from another provider.
Even just a cronjob or scheduled task to download the backups to a machine at another location would be a big improvement. Then you can do it far more often because it’s automated.
But personally I like to have both a copy on a PC and a cloud backup, in addition to the server.
I’m using the easy Lemmy script to run the docker instance. How do I take a backup of a running docker instance.
The backups I’ve done so far are full shard backups. But I don’t have a way to automate that.
The page here explains getting a database dump on a running instance (and how to restore): https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/backup_and_restore.html
Then just back up the other files in the volumes directory where Lemmy is installed (everything except postgres, which is what the database dump does).
The pictrs volume includes both the uploaded images and the image cache. I have no idea how to separate out the uploaded images so you don’t have to back up the cache, I just back it all up.
this is the bash script I use to create backups
it creates very small zip files as a result so it’s very efficient
I made a cron for it to run every 3 hours, like
I figured out how to do this with docker container, but that’s not ideal for a script.
Using docker compose it just fails with: Service “postgres” is not running container #1
I can see lemmy-easy-deploy if I do: docker compose ls
The service name is postgres in the docker-compose.yml file. Any idea what the issue might be?
Where is this lemmy-easy-deploy? I haven’t seen that before, maybe if I read how it works I can figure out what’s wrong
Backblaze is fairly cheap but can be slow to get data from.