zero_iq

This needs to be fixed, IMO.

It’s not at all obvious to newcomers. If you signed up on a smaller server (as you’re advised to do), it makes it look like there’s not much going on on Lemmy. It also makes it harder to find active communities and discourages participation.

So now everyone and their dog is building Lemmy community explorers. This functionality should be baked into Lemmy itself, and available on every instance, so you can just browse and search all communities (seeing the true community sizes) and simply click join and be done. No confusing redirection to other instances, or having to copy and paste weird snippets of text into search boxes in other tabs.

Funny how you say it’s not a problem, then go on to describe the problem that needs to be dealt with. Dealing with scaling is a problem, and it’s a problem that costs money.

Posts like this: https://lemm.ee/post/58472 suggest it is a problem. The rise in traffic seen by Lemmy in the last few days is absolutely tiny compared to a site like reddit, and already instances are struggling to cope. The recent growth in user registrations represents only about 0.007% of reddit’s active user base. (~60K new Lemmy users vs 861,000,000 active monthly reddit users)

There are 190+ Lemmy instances last time I checked, yet almost all the brunt of this load has been borne by a handful of servers, which see an inordinate amount of traffic while 100+ other servers sit almost idle. Why should a handful of “lucky” servers have to pay all the hosting costs? What if a volunteer-run instance explodes to reddit-like levels of popularity? It will simply fold, unless the volunteer has serious money to throw at the problem. A site like reddit costs millions to run.

Digg’s still around, and still active… One of the posts today had a staggering 5 comments in just 7 hours! Must be the influx of displaced reddit users lol

Active has a 48-hour cut-off, and the ranking function it uses seems to encourage the same few posts to stay at the top for 48 hours. It’s basically the same ranking as “Hot”, but using the timestamp of the last comment instead of the time of posting to decay its ranking over time.

This means any comment activity whatsoever on a popular thread bumps it back up the rankings significantly, and I suspect leads to a kind of snowballing effect that keeps posts higher up. Ideally, it would use some metric based on user interactions over a time period to calculate a score of activity rather than solely the latest comment. In effect, it seems to act more like a “top from last 48 hours”. (Although I would add I’m a newbie to Lemmy, so might not yet have an accurate picture of its behaviour).

Lemmy seemed to get much livelier for me when I switched my default to Hot, but I wish there was a way to disable the auto-updates (I’d rather see new items only on browser refresh). Active sort feels pretty stale to me.

Lots of traffic, lots of posts, lots of comments, … a torrent of incoming data. That’s going to need more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU power, higher running costs. The original instance hosting the community bears a higher load than the instances that duplicate it.

Ideally, there would be a way to more evenly distribute this load across instances according to their resources, but from my (currently limited) knowledge, I don’t think Lemmy/ActivityPub is really geared for that kind of distributed computing, and currently I don’t believe that there’s a way to move subs between instances to offload them (although I believe some people may be working on that).

Perhaps the Lemmy back-end could use a distributed architecture for serving requests and storage, such that anyone could run a backend server to donate resources without necessarily hosting an instance.

For example, I currently have access to a fairly powerful spare server. I’m reluctant to host a Lemmy instance on it as I can’t guarantee its availability in the long term (so any communities/user accounts would be lost when it goes down), but while it’s available I’d happily donate CPU/storage/bandwidth to a Lemmy cloud, if such a thing existed.

There are pros and cons to this approach, but it might be worth considering as Lemmy grows in popularity.

The % of people who care might be small, but it is that same tiny percentage who have the largest impact, and who are crucial to the smooth functioning of reddit.

If they all leave or get booted, reddit will noticeably change for the worse and a larger % of users will leave with them. I can only hope that the number of users fleeing to new platforms like Lemmy is sufficient to make them viable and strong alternatives.

If all the cool kids leave and set up shop elsewhere, reddit will be seen as outdated and people will start to leave it behind. Especially if Lemmy goes enough to gain unique new features/communities/traditions/memes/etc. Digg was abandoned so quickly in part because reddit was already there, complete with its own community, in-jokes, and sense of community for people to join in with and feel part of. Lemmy isn’t there yet, but fingers crossed there are enough people involved now to have reached a critical mass that drives increased adoption.

Working for me (from UK).

EDIT: seems they migrated to a new server earlier today to handle their increased load. Maybe a hiccup related to that, or your DNS server is still pointing to the old instance or something (in which case it should eventually fix itself)