Comment by NathanielThomas@lemmy.world on On the future of Lemmy vs reddit

Please indulge a few shower thoughts I had:

I wouldn’t worry about Lemmy having as many users as reddit in the short term. Success is not just a measure of userbase. A system just needs a critical mass, a minimum number of users, to be self-perpetuating. For a reddit post that has 10k comments, most normal people only read a few dozen comments anyways. You could have half the comments on that post, and frankly the quality might go up, not down. (That said, there are many communities below that minimum critical mass at the moment.)
Lemmy is now a real alternative. When reddit imploded Lemmy wasn’t fully set up to take advantage of the exodus, so a lot of users came over to the fediverse and gave up right away. There were no phone apps, the user interface was rudimentary, and communities weren’t yet alive. Next time reddit screws up in a high profile way, and they will screw up, the fediverse will be ready.
Lemmy has way more potential than reddit. Reddit’s leadership has always been incompetent and slow at fixing problems. The fediverse has been very responsive to user feedback in comparison.

It feels like it’s up all the time when I use it. Must depend on the instance. Even Reddit was frequently down for maintenance and other issues.

Try using one of the medium-size instances. You get the same experience as on lemmy.world, minus all the scaling problems. Just create an account on one of them and copy over your settings and subs with lasim. You can even use the same username if it’s still available on the other instance.

If communities I’m interested in are on LW then it doesn’t matter which instance I use. If LW is down then Lemmy is down.

You can still see posts and comments from lemmy.world while it’s down. Making new posts/comments might be an issue though

I can see old stuff on archive.org from all over the web. But when something is down - it’s down. Because the whole purpose of communities is online communication between their members.

You’re right. On the other hand, beginning to use smaller instances might help to reduce the overload of lw in the long run. It might also make the Fediverse more resilient. Reducing the dependency on big instances in my opinion is a good thing.

Yeah, if I were LW, I would stop allowing new users. I feel like servers should be either user or community based, not both. One for users has nice things like alternate skins (e.g. a.lemmy.world or old.lemmy.world) and ones for communities are focused primarily on having good moderators and being super reliable so that federations to them work 100% of the time.

It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.

It depends on your instance. I have account on lemmy.world and it’s indeed been having stability issues. However some other instances seem a bit more stable, like lemmy.ca.

I’ve seen posts on lemmy.world asking for more voluntary admins because of the sudden growth. And apparently they are also the preferred instance to be attacked.

That’s an issue of your instance, not of Lemmy. Smaller, less populated instances tend to be more stable.

Correct, I have an alt account on a different instance because .world is down so much.

Yes, the network load should be distributed among many small servers. That’s why my main acc is on monero.town

Do you have accounts on two (or more) servers?

I think, for now anyway, that that is something everyone should do, hear me out!

I have a server up and running but no users, I would be relieved if people subscribed but not with their sole account for the whole lemmyverse.

So if you want a quick server, for an alt account/backup account head over to lemmy.mindoki.com!

I might be slow at accepting, I have a full-time job, but it will be done!

I see no point personally in actively using more than one account.

If you want many users registered on your instance, I suggest you make the server about a general topic people can identify with. E.g. programming.dev is generally about programming, so it hosts communities for all sorts of programming languages. It seems like you like art, maybe make the server about art generally or a (popular) direction of art and advertise your instance with that. I don’t think we have an instance about art yet

hobbit.world has some great LotR related art btw.

Hey thank you and except my computer related hobbies&work I do like the arts very much :-)

I have a super user on the server otherwise I’m trying to use only one account too, mostly because hopefully my instance won’t get DDOSed all the time!

Most of the communities I’m interested in are on LW. If LW is down, Lemmy is down for me. It is also important to understand that LW is experiencing these issues because it has the largest population. The more people come to Lemmy the more instances will cross this threshold and will go offline.

The more people build instances and the more people create communities outside of lemmy.world, the more resilient all this will be. Lemmy is the kind of place where you can fix your issues by building alternatives.

Hosting an instance has some cost and technical difficulties, so I don’t go around recommending that, but creating an account on a mid-sized instance and creating communities there for what you like to talk about is in everyone’s power.

One issue I see is reports as recent as a month ago of people bringing an instance to it’s knees with a python script on 1 desktop computer. It’s one thing to ask for more instances and investment into the hardware to run them from more people, but it’s another thing not realizing that the code itself is heavily under optimized. For now, and you can see this everytime there’s an outage via the atlassian uptime tracker notes, server owners are throwing more resources to bandaid issues.

I myself am currently running an under optimized application for my company, we are using 4x the amount of money to run it as what it’s meant to replace currently. At a certain point even throwing the kitchen sink at problems stops working.

Lemmy’s code needs to mature more, but im excited about the future for sure.

There is a nice button on each instance that turns off new registrations. Once an instance owner has enough users and don’t want to upgrade the instance anymore, he checks that one.

It will be impossible to ddos every Lemmy instance, not very efficiently at least. Now it’s super easy to just bomb Lemmy.world.

But even if I’m on my instance, lemme.ee, and LW is down, I’m not going to see anything from that instance. Which is where the most activity is. So I might see the same link for an article locally, with two comments, and no interaction from the instance with 300 comments.

I mean, eventually other instances will grow, but then they will face the same problems as Lemmy.world.

While world is down, you can still read everything that was posted and federated before it went down on other instances. It’s not like you suddenly don’t have anything to read (unless you are on here 24 hrs / day).

It’s not really just about reading, it’s the engagement. I can read something from a couple of hours ago, comment now, and then somebody might read it in a couple of hours. And then comment back. But then I’m barely interested in the conversation because I’ve moved on.

But I’m just nitpicking. I know it’s going to balance out. Or it won’t and we’ll move on to something else that does LOL. Or I can always spend more time outside. Gasp.

Being outside is dangerous, it has fresh air and sunshine. :)

Do your part and try a smaller instance. http://lemmy.today has not been down even once. I’m a heavy user there.

But if you don’t like that one, pick any other smaller instance and you won’t have this problem.

Yeah, I joined lemmy.today so I could have a place to go when my OG lemmy.world is down. I like lemmy.world, but it’s constantly down (like right now). I suppose there’s no reason I shouldn’t just use this one as my primary, though I do like the other skins that lemmy.world added (old.lemmy.world and a.lemmy.world) when I’m on desktop.

I haven’t looked into it but couldn’t those skins be installed on other instances also? Hopefully open source thingies.

Yeah, but they have to be installed by the server admins. lemmy.world added them. I’m not aware of any other instances that have them, but I’d love for them to be standard. The a.lemmy.world is my favorite lemmy experience so far (though I can’t…ummm…use it right now).

Admin of Lemmy.today added all of the them yesterday. I like how fast old is actually, but I’m on mobile app almost always anyway.

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