this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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What would be the best thing to do to help keep lemmy.world up? Donate? Servers? What is the best way to help?

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[–] Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Best I can do is upload memes and add to the load.

[–] Kalcifer@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's actually not a terrible idea. Lemmy really needs content. It doesn't necessarily matter what that content is, it Is just really starving for activity in general. So anything that you post is a huge help.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

Lemmy needs content. Lemmy.world needs resources or even just for people to spread out into other instances. It's the fediverse after all. You don't even need to have or use Lemmy to enjoy Lemmy content.

[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Move to a different instance to spread the load. You can see all the same content from any other instance, but the experience will be a lot better with less lag.

Lemmy is not the same as lemmy.world.

The problem with lemmy.ml and lemmy.world is that they are just too popular and instances don't scale well.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't understand how a million tiny instances is supposed to scale better than a few big instances.

Caching all the data from another instance is overhead. If you're not serving that to enough people, your instance is going to create more traffic than it reduces.

1-10 person instances can't possibly help. Maybe 10,000 users on an instance is valuable for scaling.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would indeed say 1000-5000 users instance should be the soft spot. Having a look at https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list and filter by 1m (monthly active users) shows that 27k are on Lemmy.world, while Lemmy.ml is second with only 3,8k.

A healthier solution would be to have all the small instances (imagine the 25 biggest, so up to Lemmy.zip) to gain users, so that LW would be less critical

[–] kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there any functional difference between 4 people funding and running 1 instances vs 4 people funding and running 4 instances?

[–] Serinus@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Their ALL feeds will only have their individual servers unless their users go to the other instances and subscribe to communities. And only the communities they subscribe to will be fetched. But they'll be fetched for all users on your instance with only one sub.

(Technically they're pushed and not fetched.)

[–] sabreW4K3@lemmy.tf 1 points 1 year ago

There are certain things that are memory intensive and CPU intensive. If you have 10k on one server doing that it really adds up. However having them across a wide range of smaller servers, its not such a big deal.

As a user, you literally lose out on nothing not being on lemmy.world. You can partake in all the same conversations, communities and everything. In fact when lemmy.world is down, you can still see everything and when it comes back up, your posts will synchronize. There's genuinely no upside to being on lemmy.world. That's the way the system was designed.

[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Each instance only downloads relieve content to its users. An instance with a popular community will have to handle all the posts made to that community, which will still be much smaller than all of them. While the overall load might be higher, the load on any given instance will be lower.

Images, by far the biggest bandwidth user, are directly transfered from posting instance to client and are not federated. Having more instances will spread out that load very effectively.

[–] Polar@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You can see all the same content from any other instance

Nah. I moved from ml to world to .ca, and .ca is the best. I didn't realize how much content ml and world defederated from. I love it on .ca

[–] maporita@unilem.org 3 points 1 year ago

I moved from lemmy.ml to unilemmy who specifically don't defederate from anyone. So they treat people as adults who can decide for themselves what they want to see. If you don't like something just block it .. simple.

[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

Helpful trick, if you go to [any instance url]/instances (for example https://discuss.tchncs.de/instances ) it will show all the instances it is federated and defederated with. (Use your browser's find in page feature to scroll down to the "blocked instances" section)

[–] YeetMe@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Two things I can see, needs to be on scalable infrastructure rather than a few hosts running docker-compose. Needs to have support for in-memory key/value stores for caching. Either of these would probably help out a bit. Donate to the developers or instance maintainer and either could happen.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It will also help to evolve towards some form of immutable governance for the instances. By this I mean an instance should be more than the individual admin(s). If such an individual was to tire off, get distracted etc, the instance does not suffer the same fate. Technical federation is one thing. Federated governance is a whole different issue. I am not advocating for formal organizations (but those would help in some cases), but rather a clear provision for instance-continuity beyond the current admins.

[–] honk@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Me and a handful of friends started a formally registered non profit in germany. Not internet related but art related stuff and it was surprisingly easy, fast and even more surprising the regulations and requirements actually make sense. That is the way to go to secure that no admin ever goes nuts and takes an entire instance with them lmao.

I‘m fairly certain that similar organizations exist in most countries snd the process should be relatively similar.

[–] mwalimu@baraza.africa 1 points 1 year ago

This is the way to go. Gives some reasonable grounds to commit to an instance when you expect it will be up in a month. We are also trying that with Baraza with a trusteeship kind of design.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What exactly is the issue bringing lemmy.world down that these two things would address?

[–] nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Too many users, the Lemmy instance software is not very fast.

Here is a (few weeks old) chart of users by instance:

[–] emilygage@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Interesting! I wasn't aware that .world was so popular.

[–] Nunar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Fantastic. Where do I do any of that?

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Spread out to one of the other 1300 instances maybe?

Fediverse means federated. Not one instance.

Donating to lemmy.world because it has become too big seems like a self inflicted problem.

[–] pjhenry1216@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly, everyone not joining lemmy.world would help. Also, not confusing Lemmy and lemmy.world as the same thing. If you have an alt account on another server, consider making it your permanent account. It's the fediverse. You don't need to be on lemmy.world to see lemmy.world.

[–] pyrflie@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Honestly having a list of what makes instances different would help. I have two lemmy accounts right now and figuring out which instance to pick after Limmy.world is tough.

And I only want maximum federation. I'm willing to do my own moderation and curation, just not hosting. Though that may come later if needed.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm really happy at Lemmy.today - federates with everyone, no downvotes and fast instance. Just needs more users.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

federates with everyone

Redflag. What country is it hosted in?

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This one is in western USA. Why is it a red flag?

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The vlemmy situation. Just make sure they defederate instances hosting things illegal in their home state.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What happened to it? I thought they just lost their ml domain.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Vlemmy was .net

They federated with an instance that was hosting content that was illegal in the country vlemmy was hosted in.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok thanks. It's kind of hard to keep track of all servers in the fediverse, so hopefully these illegal hosting servers would be highlighted by the community somehow.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The one that caused vlemmy trouble is pretty well known at this point for welcoming animated content that is illegal in many countries. They were too careless.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you. I think we should keep an eye out for those instances and maintain some list about them.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Just defederate

spoilerburgit

at the very least

Edit I don't want to bring attention to them.

[–] coconutxyz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Easy migration. Migrating account post history or migrating community from one to another easily

[–] hellishharlot@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I've been creating accounts on other servers as well so that I can protect the username and also have a certain amount of per acct specializations.

[–] Pansen@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I create an account on a small instance and that instance shuts down, will I not lose my account and post history?

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes. This is one of the risks picking a small instance. On the other hand, all instances were small once. Most still are. And you should help them grow instead of sitting on the largest one.

Instances that grow are much less likely to shut down. I only know a few instances that have shut down actually, so I don't think it's a large risk. We wouldn't have 1300 instances if they would shut down often.

I know it's only been a few months since Lemmy got a lot of new users. So we will see how it plays out. But for a healthy Lemmy ecosystem, there should be hundreds of active instances with lots of people.

[–] Destragras@kbin.social -1 points 1 year ago

Have any instances considered taking money for running advertisements? I don't mean the type where they are shoved between posts or following you down the page with flashing animated gifs, but subtle banners that may appear at the top or the side of the page.