Whether you are a Reddit refugee (I am one) or just randomly stumbled upon Lemmy and decided to join lemmy.world, welcome to the Fediverse.

If you have been here for long enough and settled in and now finally feel comfortable with Lemmy, I highly advice you to move to smaller instances. I just newly left Lemmy.world to join Lemm.ee.

We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance. This will benefit the admins of Lemmy.world a lot as they would not have to deal with such a high amount of users. It also leaves room for new users to join and have a good experience rather than an experience filled with server outages where they will give up on Lemmy.

  • cerevant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    1 year ago

    Users concentrating on large servers benefits all the servers where content lives by reducing the number of connections they have to make to update data. Large user servers also act as a cache for the content, reducing storage duplication. Finally, large user servers improve the UX for the Fediverse’s biggest weakness: figuring out how to get your instance to talk to a community on another instance.

    Meanwhile, the current situation is helping the developers refactor the software to scale to actual large user bases - the tens of thousands of users on Lemmy.world do not constitute a “large” user base by any internet-scale metric. It also concentrates the DDOS jerks on a target with the skills and resources to fight back. Finally, small servers going offline are a substantial burden on the instances that remain.

    Big, robust, secure instances for users, smaller distributed instances with limited direct access for communities. That’s the real practical architecture for Lemmy.

    • Jomn@jlai.luEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      It would still be better to have multiple “large” servers, instead of only one or two, which is currently the case. I really don’t think that it is a good thing to have a big difference between the biggest and the next biggest servers, as it effectively centralizes the content around the biggest instance.

      I however agree that it doesn’t make sense to have tons of tiny instances.

  • falseteefs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    It is a good point but are people really joining lemmy.world en mass still and if so why don’t the admins close registrations?

    • MagneticFusion@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      That is a good point. Currently things have stabilized. But you never know what might cause another mass migration to Lemmy in the future, which will lead to every new account joining Lemmy.world.

    • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for sharing this! It seems that you are the only admin of your instance, do you plan to have a back up person?

      • Philip@endlesstalk.orgEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        It is on my to-do list, but it would take some work to add support for multiple people to have access to everything required and I would also need a lot more documentation, than I currently have.

        • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          That’s all good, you can take your time! I was just asking because usually that’s a deal breaker for potential joiners to see a one-person admin team

  • imnotneo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    don’t see the benefit tbh. software will scale, or not, if not people will leave for others

  • infamousbelgian@waste-of.spaceEnglish
    17·
    1 year ago

    Even decided to run my own instance! Power to the people!

    Jokes aside, my server can handle 10 or so more people. So if someone is looking for a new home… waste-of.space.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    We need to capitalize on the decentralized nature of the Fediverse and Lemmy instead of having everyone joining one instance

    But honestly, social media naturally benefits from everyone being around the biggest totem pole. It means we can randomly run into people and topics and communities that we never knew we wanted to engage with.

    If we decentralize, we need an already established community-web, or a very specific plan for which to find in the future. Plus, I’ll be honest, between Mastodon, Lemmy and (now) Firefish, I can say that finding communities on the fediverse is annoying in all the right ways to make someone just go back to Twitter/Reddit. I can’t blame people for not wanting to engage with that.

    But, importantly: Most users being on a huge central instance solves that problem. Yeah it goes against “the spirit of the fediverse”. But for the user, it has effectively only upsides.

    • Lazylazycat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      But you’ll still see all content from every federated instance in your feed? It doesn’t matter which one you’re signed up to.

    • what_is_a_name@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      There is nearly no benefit of being on the largest instance. In fact many would benefit from a smaller instance.

      • Anafroj@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        Playing devil advocate, here : you can expect the life expectancy of bigger instances to be slightly to significantly bigger, if anything because their admins feel more responsibility due to the number of users depending on them. That argument does not hold if we’re comparing using a big instance vs self-hosting, though (the life-expectancy of your self hosted instance may be smaller, but if you shut it down it means you’re not interested anymore in the fediverse, so no big deal - except maybe for the holes you leave behind you). And anyway, I’m not sure better life expectancy is more important than making sure the fediverse stays decentralized.

        • Blaze (he/him)@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s a good argument for bigger instances, but not one for using the largest one. Lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works have more that 2k members, sopuli.xyz and reddthat.com have 600 members, based on your argument their expected life expectantly is as long as Lemmy.world

  • cooopsspace@infosec.pubEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    Let’s stop calling people “refugees” from social media sites. It detracts from actual refugees experiencing real existential issues.

    • jjffnn@feddit.dkEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      While i do see your point about not detracting from actual life changing issues, refugee literally means “one that flees” so people fleeing from reddit are refugees by definition. 🙂

  • Vub@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    It is the strength and the weakness of it all.

    On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.

  • topinambour_rex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    1 year ago

    I joined a local instance of mastodonte. I had days without being able to access my stuff, and finally recreated an account on the main mastodonte instance. So this time I directly picked a large instance.

    • astral_avocado@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I had similar issues, I joined a small Mastodon instance and for some reason couldn’t see comments or amounts of boosts. I guess it was just misconfigured

  • Venicon@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    Just created my account on sopuli.xyz before I realised I could migrate the whole account from Lemmy.world but have had zero downtime since then so that’s a positive.

  • Tag365@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    What about the instances I created on Lemmy.world? Will I be able to moderate them from other instances?