Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.
You’re thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.
If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it’s really you. Would be cool. 😎
Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn’t dependent on one instance.
Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.
It’s just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It’s going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.
Also…there’s a non-zero chance it’s getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.
I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn’t like you can extort any money out of lemmy.
Lemmy is still alpha software, thrust into the limelight by the fall of Reddit. It is still in its infancy. Reddit has had over 18 years to get it right. So it will take some time.
Lemmy.world is super big AND being attacked constantly. Smaller instances don’t have these issues and they are stable and fast. You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I’m on lemmy.today and it’s fast and stable. Come join us and you will see.
Basically use the fediverse the way it was meant to be used.
You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.
I had no idea, just tried and you are right. Do you know if everything works the same, like moderation?
Yeah it’s all federated. If you get banned from a community on Lemmy.world, you will not be able to access it from Lemmy.today for example (with your lemmy.today user account).
This is the really super cool part about the fediverse. People don’t realize… This is where the magic is.
If Lemmy.world is down, you still access posts and threads and make posts etc from lemmy.today… And it all syncs when Lemmy.world is up again.
Another mind blowing moment is when you realize you can read and post on Lemmy from Mastadon… So you can combine interacting with Mastadon and Lemmy in the same conversion.
Your instance only has two communities and they’re both about Lemmy. Seems a bit boring to me. Sorry.
This should be put in large letters on the join lemmy site so people can understand the point of the fediverse…
Local communities are totally irrelevant when deciding which instance should host your account.
Reread their last sentence.
What instance you use as your home instance is irrelevant unless it has been defederated from an unusual amount of instances. You likely don’t want to try and use lemmygrad as your home lol.
Otherwise, home instance is only going to determine your local feed. Which is pretty much the least used feed anywhere other than maybe beehaw. Discovery via all combined with searches lets you populate your subscribed feed, so those are the ones that you’ll use most.
Lemmy is federated by design. If you try and treat instances like some kind of dedicated site the way reddit was, you might as well not use it at all because you’ll be missing out on the benefits federation brings to the format.
Are you old enough to remember geocities? It had these circles where individual sites within geocities would link to each other. You would have your own site, but be linked to maybe hundreds of others. That’s closer to what lemmy is than the kind of reddit experience you’re probably used to.
Yeah it’s just getting started, and you can start new communities if you like. But no point starting ones that already exists on other instances.
The amount of local communities doesn’t matter much, Im subscribed to like 100 remote communities anyway. :)
I guess you need to do some more research on how Lemmy works.
You can follow any community from any instance. For now you could create an account at some lesser populated instances, I had one on lemmy.ml, made another account on monyet.cc. It’s a minor inconvenience that you have to subscribe to communities but other than that my experience with lemmy has been very good.
I think there was a new version of lemmy released so the instance may be in the process of being updated.
I’ve started a 2nd account on another instance just for situations like that.
I made a tool that can help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It allows you to synchronize subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings between accounts.
(though FYI different versions only gracefully handle a specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3 - see my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2094948 )
EDIT: Second link isn’t working - must be a Lemmy bug. But you can see it as a recent post on my profile.
specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3
What API-breaking changes did you find?
There’s no official way that I know of. I believe it’s in the backlog of desires features on both Lemmy and Kbin. I will say it may be longer until there’s a migration between the two platforms, but there are some unofficial migrations out there between two accounts utilizing the same platform (like one Lemmy instance to another or one kbin instance to another).
Do you mean the same username or different usernames? I may be misunderstanding your point.
