Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It’s probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn’t apologize at all). Allegedly they’re trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it’s not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we’re going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
yeah, that ama convinced me it was time to take the plunge. just created this account, first comment on lemmy lol
first comment on lemmy
From [email protected]
Lol. There’s gonna be a lot of heads exploding when people realize what the fediverse is and how it works.
I don’t even understand, myself. ATM I have one kbin account and a few Lemmy accounts. Not sure if there is an advantage to having an account on a kbin instance vs a Lemmy instance or anything??
At the moment, Jerboa seems like the best way to browse on Android (although nowhere near as polished as many of the bigger Reddit apps obviously), so it seems like picking a compatible instance with that works best right now. Still, it’s all a bit overwhelming!
Just wrote a big post about Lemmy Vs kbin’s, so I don’t have to write it twice :)) https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/9489/-/comment/40195
I have no clue how to view that link on my home instance
Maybe this link works better? https://sh.itjust.works/comment/33194
yes!, i need to learn how these links work!
sadly thats sometimes a little difficult. Entering the link in the search only works if its the link from the original instance. One can geht this link by following the colerfull rainbow icon under the post (in web view).
Basically the main difference is who your admin team is. So that means different moderation styles, allowing NSFW or not, allowing downvotes, controlling which communities get made (or not), etc.
You can create communities on your home instance if your admins allow it (Lemmy.ml and Kbin do, Beehaw does not). But you have to make an account on an instance to create a community there.
It’s totally reasonable to jump between instances until you find one you like.
I’m on beehaw right now and didn’t realize creating communities was disabled. Very interesting. Thanks!
same, I created a kbin account. this is my first comment 👋
Welcome to kbin! I’ve been here about a week and the community and content is great. I hope you like it too, great choice!
Hello from Lemmy! Federation is neat.
welcome to kbin!
Hell yes, welcome!
Welcome!
Same here, this is also my first kbin comment.
Welcome to the fediverse! Have fun exploring all it has to offer!
Welcome!
It’ll balance out as more instances start up. I also joined blahaj. The flurry of activity gives me some vague sense of hope that most of the communities I followed on reddit will be able to restart on Lemmy.
Its almost too late, ive seen posts on several subs saying they’re shutting down permanently due to the effective permanent removal of 3rd party mod tools and the misery of the 1st party apps. Reddit could be looking at a mass exodus a-la-digg. It remains to be seen how the fediverse will handle the mass influx of former redditors. If Spez has any shred of decency left he’d apologize profusely, return to a free API, and then beg the mods who are leaving to stay. Knowing capitalists, he absolutely will not.
I joined vlemmy.net today … I think it said there was 1 other user when I joined lol. No idea what I’m doing but so far it seems like I can see all the content from other instances as well.
Yep! The idea behind federation is that there are a bunch of smaller instances that can all talk to each other rather than one big central authority like with Facebook or Reddit!
Nah, read the AMA. He and Reddit (the company) in general are doubling down. I was hoping it was just anchoring (where the initial price for something is so ridiculously high, any other offer even if it’s more than you should pay seems reasonable). But from his comments, and the Devs’ responses, it’s clear it’s basically just a way to kill the API totally for users, I guess the only possible remaining use for the API is AI training. Tech companies would probably pay that much because it genuinely is worth it to them.
Yeah, I saw the comment he made about the Apollo developer. He’s lying plainly, without even trying to refute any claims made against him and his team. He really believes the company can stand to float on a more mainstream userbase. I doubt it honestly. More likely it will start a slow trend downwards as the mods are mostly leaving, so the site will have to deal with massive site wide content moderation and community management issues. He doesn’t care. Maybe he’s already checked out and he plans to step aside once this transitory phase is over.
The idea that reddit can survive purely on a mainstream userbase is ludicrous anyway, the entire point of the website has always been its many niche communities. Its ecosystem of interconnecting and interacting user groups. Thats never going to be a big sell to pure social media oriented users, who already have Instagram and TikTok to fulfill their algorithm needs. So financially I have no idea how they plan to survive in the long term.
Idk how they can fundamentally misunderstand this (and have been for years). They haven’t cared about mods for years, their official app is complete trash. Reddit was always supposed to be an alternative to twitter/Facebook/Instagram/tiktok, not a competitor. Like take the video player for example. Hardly even works most of the time, and is a clear tiktok clone. Why are they doing that? Tiktok and Reddit could not be more different apps. They can pay mods, Reddit can’t or won’t. I expect soon if they survive this they’ll move towards in house moderation.
I didn’t wait for the AMA to get hammered
Remember folks, even if you do or don’t like Lemmy it is an alternative that appreciates the increased interest.
It also has something Reddit has been losing. Which is the small town feel. More people now even migrate to discord from Reddit. There was a time when on Reddit I felt like real people interacted. Now it all feels astroturfed.
Also, if they are suppressing mentions via Reddit just mention it on discord
I’m really curious to see how this will work out. Also very curious about being kinda at a start of the build up of a community. I know it’s not from “scratch”, but it’s still kinda exciting
It is isnt it
It is :)
Same. Most things in life I can say I really wasn’t there from the beginning but this I really think I can lol. I hope I just don’t do the “before it was cool” hipster thing
Shamelessly plugging my https://lemmy.cafe instance.
Signed up! I do think it needs to be linked still though
You don’t have to sign up for every instance you want to.
I can see that you’re currently signed in to your lemmy.ml instance, for example, and if you go there and search for a community in another instance, like [email protected], you’ll be able to view and interact with that community without ever leaving your instance.
So it is already linked in a way. Go ahead and try it out with some communities you’ve seen in other instances.
Oh nice! Okay thank you
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless.
IMO, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Different communities have different priorities, principles, and technical requirements, and will take different approaches to controversy. Some communities are low-profile and laid back. Others are magnets for abuse and may require additional moderation, and even technical changes, like disabling image embeds (as one example) to mitigate harassment. Some are filled with avid shitposters, while others insist on the utmost degree of civility. Some have advanced requirements for operational security. Some want broad access to the network, while other would prefer a quiet corner. Some might be focused on video and require an instance that can handle the additional bandwidth and storage requirements.
Who hosts your instance is important. The jurisdiction your instance is housed in is important. If a community requires special accommodations for accessibility or other reasons, that is important. If an instance wants to go above the technical level and do things like verify users (kinda like journa.host) that makes an important distinction from your typical instance.
In the beginning, we won’t know who’s trustworthy, but this is the Internet. There will be controversies, and we will see how various admins respond to these controversies. Over time, they will gain reputations, both good and bad. It is best if somebody who already has a good reputation, like a respected mod from another community is able to operate the new home for that community.
For now, it probably doesn’t matter where you end up, but as time passes, it is good to keep an ear to the ground and see how things develop. Eventually you will find a solid niche. This is a problem even the fanciest join-xyz-fediservice website can’t really solve, but it is meaningful.
The one thing that I don’t like is that you can’t change your home instance. I signed up for Lemmy without knowing anything about it, and I mean I knew absolutely ZERO about how it works. Therefore, I just clicked on a random instance because I didn’t even know what an instance was, and I signed up. So what if I joined the wrong one for me? What if it turns out to be shit? I Guess I could just sign up for a different one with a different login, but wish there was an option to jump to a new one with your same login if you wanted to.
For now, if it turns out to be shit, you can just join a different instance. Perhaps leave a note in your old bio which directs people to your new account.
We need to build some kind of SSO that allows Lemmy users to authenticate with the same account on any instance, but will appear as if you’re still using the instance you registered on. That way you could just login to another instance if your ‘home’ instance goes down for whatever reason.
I like the sound of this, just unsure how this would be able to authenticate an account on behalf of a home instance that’s down, in a trustworthy way.
I’m not familiar with the inner workings of Lemmy and the Fediverse, so the following is based on similar implementations I’m familiar with…
SSO implementations usually require the website the user originally registered on (home instance) to confirm the account is real and authenticate it, and in most cases a new user account is automatically created using the SSO authentication details (this would prevent the user from appearing as if they’re using their home instance).
To achieve what you want, I think we’d need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I’m not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
On the flip side, I’m pretty sure SSO with a Lemmy instance that is active could work. While it would bring a lot of benefit to less tech-savvy users, and a lot of convenience to us when we’re given a threadiverse link to another instance, from a technical perspective I think that would be a challenging implementation. Users would need to be careful about having their credentials phished on a malicious instance too
i’d also be worried that some corp would try to take control of the centralized sso mechanism and thus control the user base. imho we must avoid the instinct to centralize anything.
but potentially maybe there’s a federated directory where people could register and be assigned a server to do load balancing to key problems like lemmy.ml are experiencing (?)
To achieve what you want, I think we’d need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I’m not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
Since we’re a decentralized federated network, it would stand to reason that the SSO implementation would also be so. Maybe something built on top of DHT shared by every instance, which just stores user key hashes to verify they are who they say they are. That way there would be no issue with central authentication authority and all instances will go by the hash table for user auth.
Quick check and here’s what mastodon has been doing on the issue https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16221
it’s like email. You need a server somewhere to hold your inbox. They should make an easy way to migrate your user to another instance, though.
Some kind of aliasing
The ability to redirect your profile link to your new profile when you switch instances would be nice too. A sort of “inbox-forwarding” option, to continue the email metaphor.
Noo. Instances are responsible for moderating their users because if you have bad users all coming from one instance then you’ll get defederated, but instances will also defederate each other when drama happens.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it’s almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just “Join Lemmy” and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren’t and it feels like it should be the other way around?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else’s instance. You just have to host your own.
But it’s always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else’s instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn’t want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is…less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user’s name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there’s room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you’re registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
It would also be cool to be able to not have communities be locked to where they’re created or at least make them mobile.
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on [email protected] it can merge with [email protected] and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
I think the best option to bridge the gap between nearly identical communities on different instances (and even the same instance) would be some kind of post tagging.
Say you post something on lemmy.ml/c/piracy but has to do with bittorrent or something. The original post can get a piracy and bittorrent tag that you can click on that to see all posts across instances with that tag. Kinda like hashtags and such on mastodon work, but on lemmy.
The thing about reddit clones is I think they try to be too much like reddit. The best thing about leaving reddit and starting new platforms is that they can really be anything the community wants it to be.
This is something that made me stop using Mastodon, too many instances with bad method of connecting them. I’d much prefer that instances aren’t seen to the user (I wouldn’t mind somewhere with the text “this community is hosted by X on server Y”). But seeing @username@instance is weird and many Reddit refugees won’t have any idea what does it mean. I mean, the concept of federated network is complex already.
I’ve also encountered a lot of bugs in my short time of use which I’d like to see fixed, but I’m not sure where can I report them, or to see if they are reported already.
Thanks!
I haven’t noticed at all, because I follow communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org from my own instance. I had this experience when Mastodon.social kept going down during major Twitter exodus phases. Federation is awesome.
Can you tell me more about the pros and cons of running your own instance? Why did you choose to do that? I’m new at this so I’m very intrigued.
Of course. Here’s a quick one:
Pros:
- You don’t depend on anyone else’s funds or time
- Always available and snappy no matter how busy some parts of the Fediverse get
- You choose who to federate with. Want to talk to both puppy-lovers and puppy-haters? No problem.
- It’s a social media account you really, in every sense of the word, own. Nobody can take it away from you. The lemmy.ml admins could accept the billions* they’re surely being offered right now for their instance, but my account is still mine.
Cons:
- Hosting costs some money, knowledge, and time.
- Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don’t really have a “Federated” timeline
*I’m joking about the billions. Probably.
Thanks for that response. Is there an easy way to start an instance?
What’s your level of technical knowledge? If you already know the terms “VPS” and “Docker”, then yeah, it’s fairly easy IMO (I have some notes here). If you have no idea what you just read, it could be a little tough. There are some rough edges to work out still, but if you join us on Matrix people are fairly helpful.
I honestly don’t know those terms but I’m very tech savvy. I’m running my own home cloud. I play around with Linux. And I just love tinkering until I fully understand how something works. I don’t see the learning curve to be a problem. I’d enjoy the experience which is why I’m seeking it out really. I think I’d really enjoy playing that role in this community.
If you have a spare machine lying around, install proxmox.
It’s a great way to learn VMs and networking.
Then you can create a VM, snapshot it (as a restore point), mess around with docker or podman, break stuff, then restore the VM to try again.
All this runs on your local network, so when it comes to setting up a Lemmy instance, you are going to want access to it from the internet. Things like Cloudflare and Tailscale can make this very easy.It’s a wonderful rabbit hole of learning!
I would recommend /r/homelab or /r/selfhosted but I think those communities are still finding a home on the fediverse+1 to Proxmox, it has been my lifeline when it comes to playing around with self hosting stuff! I’d heard about hypervisors before but was still under the impression that virtualizing had a ton of overhead (there is still some overhead, but not by much).
Additionally, Proxmox Backup Server is a really nice pairing as well!
Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don’t really have a “Federated” timeline
This seems like a pretty serious flaw in the federation protocol. Hope it’s fixed at some point.
The “subscribe & push” model is practically fundamental to ActivityPub. There’s pros and cons to this design, but ultimately I think it’s confusing and cumbersome for users…
While true, this only affects people who are hosting and running their own instance. And if they’re doing that, it isn’t that big of a deal.
Users that might struggle with the concepts are probably joining larger instances that are already federated, so the problem is solved as soon as they find the “All” button.
Is it in the ballpark of “easy if you’re a techie and experienced with Linux” to use an old PC as a server instead of paying to host it?
The short answer: yes.
The long answer: Yes, but…
If this is your home network, you’re providing attackers with an entry point into your network. You’re also giving yourself an avenue to get DDOS’d etc. You’d have to open ports and get that set up - or deal with a reverse proxy or whatever.
But generally it’s as easy as running a Docker container and pointing a domain at your IP.
And, of course, ensuring that your IP provider doesn’t run behind a Client-Grade Network Address Translator (CG-NAT). Otherwise, you’re better off renting a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or if you’re particularly strapped of money and have a lot of patience, you can bridge it with your home server using a Virtual Private Network (VPS) and a good amount of scripting to remap the ports accordingly.
kbin.social is also suffering
sorry it just has the best UI out of the one’s i’ve tried, i didn’t mean to kill it v-v
We’re glad to have ya, regardless!
I agree, the integration of microblogs + threads is brilliant and I hope people keep using it.
Yes, it was working ok before the AMA, now it’s feeling sluggish. I guess is expected considering the amount of people coming over. New users are all welcome, and we’re glad to have you.
Hmm I fully understand why, but every page on most instances (I’ve been on a few different ones) is taking a while to load (nowhere near as long as the billion dollar website Reddit takes to load their “official” website though, lol.)
I joined during the general influx so I don’t have a good gauge but how much has lemmy grown since this whole debacle? How many users were here like a month ago?
a month ago it was like around 400-500 online users, today is 2300
This was enough for me to start my own instance. It’s not too hard with ansible, and Lemmy being Rust it’s not needing that much CPU or RAM.
And I’ll invite my friends here too. If you’re capable of running your own server, do it for your friends. Form small communities and you can always subscribe to the big server communities from your own service.
deleted by creator
There should be a thread for this(starting a instance)
Here, I started one: https://lemmy.ml/post/1201750
That’ll give me a use for my TrueNAS server that’s for sure. It’s got 24 cores 200gb of RAM and I basically use it exclusively for a NAS.
Now I just have to look into how to set it up.
As long as you get a public IP address, a domain name and TLS certificate, you can federate with other servers.
I run mine in a small Hetzner box. Two gigabytes of RAM, two AMD cores, it’s almost like doing nothing even I’m federating a ton of messages all the time regarding the logs.
Don’t ban lemmygrad and we’ll be happy.
I actually just subscribed to one of your communities.
At least he was honest enough to say that the sudden massive turnaround in their attitude to API pricing was their realisation they had the AI bros over a barrel.
Given how much of the content used in the existing models has been shown to have been scraped in violation of usage licences and copyright, anyone who is serious about developing new models is going to be scrabbling desperately to get access to good data sets.
The Reddit board now realise that charging through the nose for access to their API might generate them more money than all those annoying users ever have.
This is the same type of scandal like the pao one. Reddit changed completely after that and the massive bans of subreddits. Only that time nobody decided to leave. I hope we grow to millions strong here soon and Reddit becomes a forgotten shell
Only that time nobody decided to leave.
Well, they did, but it was the r/FatPeopleHate folks who left. But they jumped ship to voat, which doesn’t even exist anymore.
I remember a lot of regular redditors going to voat during that debacle. Voat seemed amazing for a while. The trouble was that voat couldn’t handle the influx very well and couldn’t solve the frequent outages, so most of the people who migrated bounced back to reddit. Then voat started showing how friendly they were to migrants from subs like /r/FatPeopleHate, which drove the remaining “well adjusted” people back to reddit.
I wonder where are they now
Twitter, most likely
I think they went to saidit because the top posts there are all racist shit.
Said it looks pretty good. I wonder if we can take over as well?
mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn’t know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.
the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it’s going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.
having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.
i was scared my account got shut down or something, i’m relieved to hear it’s just a lot of traffic.
