I imagine there’s excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.
I’d especially be interested in the Lemmy devs’ opinions.
I’m a lemmygrad user, so it’s been a little annoying dealing with people who wander in to troll but it’s not too bad
Pretty happy.
The place and platform is capable of growth and diversity … on which, many should consider starting their own instances just to spread the load and allow people to find their moderation homes.
I’ve been wanting the fediverse to be more topic/group/community based than a twitter clone since I got here, so it makes sense to see some interest in these “Threadiverse” style platforms.
There’ll be growing pains, and the current admins and devs are probably going through some pain now. Sorry! I just hope enough community leaders, former sub-reddit mods and future admins will see the value in distributing social media and help pick up the slack.
More broadly, for those who don’t know, IMO, the fediverse has been suffering from an essentially oppressive dominance by Mastodon. Everyone thinks the fediverse is just Mastodon. Though that’s completely untrue, as there are a number of alternative platforms, some of which are rather novel and interesting, it is numerically very true with Mastodon comprising
80%of fediverse users.Generally, this amount of dominance is almost certainly bad for the future health of the fediverse and the values it seeks to promote (ie, interconnected platform and community diversity). Mastodon, at the moment, is creeping towards being just another centralised platform … essentially an OSS non-profit Twitter in its own right, which isn’t a bad thing at all, but not what the fediverse is about.
Enter the Threadiverse! Lemmy, /kbin (and even calckey a little with what will hopefully become its federated channels), and others. Not just platform diversity, but medium or format diversity.
At this moment, IMO, it is very valuable to the fediverse at large, that lemmy, /kbin etc grow and do well.
Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.
There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn’t staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don’t read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn’t a general unthemed instance for everyone. It’s broad, but not ‘reddit’ broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source
Edit: I realize this may come off as “why aren’t other people doing more things!”. I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I’m not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we’re seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming ‘reddit but here’.
I don’t know how to interpret “everyone should feel welcome here” other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more “fringe” leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don’t really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn’t something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist
I’m not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what “leftist” in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn’t mean ‘progressive capitalists’.
This isn’t just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won’t become another reddit disaster. And no, they’re not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!
I hope the reddit echo box ‘our way or the highway’, ‘everything is a pun’ mentality doesn’t transfer over as well
When someone shares a personal story about his wife’s struggle with cancer and the top reply is “I also choose this guy’s dead wife”
Aww, but Reddit pun threads are fun.
Agreed, I hope there is room for pun threads here too.
Once you’ve seen the Anne Frankly one more than a few times, you’ll have had enough
I’m in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I’ve been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.
I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.
In special I’m hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging “feels” off-topic here.
I’m all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it’s centered around being ad free and open sourced.
I fired up my own personal test instance so I can experiment with figuring out ways to reduce bottlenecks on the sysadmin/devops side - used to run the various PHP forums back in the day, so hoping to pass on some knowledge eventually.
I figure the toxic side(s) will gravitate towards instances that will tolerate their behaviour which is easier to deal with. Mods will be busy for a little bit though, and I wouldn’t be surprised if registrations closed for a bit on some of the bigger instances so they can catch up if they don’t just fall flat over on the heavy days. But, lots of smart folks trying to prep for this.
Any idea what hardware specs you need to run an instance? Like for 100 users, 1.000, 10k etc?
Or the hardware lemmy.ml runs on and the userbase?
It’s still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they’re using though in their financial statements if you’re curious, but there’s of operational optimization being tried out to see what’ll help.
The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn’t too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.
I’m on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I’m subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I’m not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.
I have an i-5 6core dell sitting so why shouldn’t I spin up a node?
I’m mostly worried about maintenance and it breaking down one day, how do you deal with that in a good way?
Regular backups should do the job. It’s all run in docker instances with mapped volumes, so you can just backup those contents regularly and roll-back worst case if things completely pooped out. Otherwise maintenance isn’t really much worse than a normal webserver - great for learning Linux CLI if you’re not already familiar.
No reason you shouldn’t spin up a node though! The more the better - lets load spread out.
I’m looking forward to the increase in traffic tbh. I have setup a pretty beefy instance with a ton of monitoring on it so that hopefully after the wave I can create a nice write up on what it would take to scale lemmy in the future. I’ll keep everyone updated with the results!
Yeah, this is a golden moment for those of us who like to learn from sudden heavy load on server software! There are not very many teachable moments like this out there, so I’m trying to soak everything up for work experience
Well:
- I’m annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website “refugees”
- I’m happy that we’re going to have more activity
- I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don’t think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
- When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
expired
Sensitivity aside, “explat” is a more clever name.
