To the newcomers to the fediverse. Don't let the last few days or even the next few be your only impression on this. When we all came over from twitter it was a shit show and nothing worked right because everything was overwhelmed. Give it a few days. It'll get better.
It's already improving, smaller communities becoming more active, which promotes faster federation across smaller server instances. the big guys are upgrading to faster servers, though I need to stress that people shouldn't all just lump into the big servers, find a local one if you can.
Spreading out is definitely the way to make this thing work. I'm sure there is more that can be implemented to help with federation speed, making sure you have all comments, etc. Those are solved with a monolith instance, but as we see you need a monster server to do it. I think instances averaging less than a few thousand users each will be the way to move forward.
Yep, if we had a way to migrate users between instances (technically possible, but not implemented) there could possibly even be a way to shuffle users off overloaded servers automatically in the future, like a form of load balancing.
Amen! This movement is far more about he actual implications of federation, not that it isn't there yet. If we have any chance to live in a world not controlled by government/corporate greed, then we have to start trusting in one another and helping to support an internet that we all control and can take part in.
Any influx like this is a clusterfuck. It's just the way it is. But this community already feels good. And it seems like those on the backend are doing everything they can. So patience it is, because this could be great.
I love being a part of something that isn't extremely large. All of the issues I've been having just add to the charm. I don't care if everything doesn't work right away. I enjoy lemmy because it is open source.
Like 2 days ago, it seems to have reached such a critical mass of popularity that once I set my feed from "local" to "all", I can just keep scrolling down and continue seeing new content. This is now sustainable for me and I can happily quit reddit for good as long as lemmy stays this popular.
Same for me. I've already found communities for most of the subreddits I liked. Though I'm having trouble subscribing to the dwarf fortress one since it won't show up in my search results for some reason.
even if it doesn't get better in the coming days, i have hope that it will get better steadily over time. the fact that recent events have given the concept of federation more publicity is a step in the right direction. when the social media giants inevitably screw over their users again in the future, more people will know where to look for better alternatives.
it took me 2 days to figure out how to join communities on other instances - maybe there's documentation for it but it wasnt obvious, I had to work it out, trial and error style. loved it! felt like I accomplished something.
reddit was too easy to use, it spoiled us to an extent.
How do you join communities in other instances? The only thing that worked for me was typing the !community@instance.stuff into the search on the website which is a hassle. I also haven't found a way to do the same in the app.
yeah that's how I've been doing it, tried it on the app and couldnt figure it out, then the app forgot my password so I uninstalled it and now just use the web version on my phone (there should be an "install" option for the site - I prefer chrome so i dont have to remember passwords). the same process works there but it's cumbersome, easier to do on a pc
Agree. There have been some hiccups, but nothing that has made it unusable. I appreciate everyone working to keep the site/s up, resize servers, mods, app developers. Also, thanks to the long-time Lemmy users for putting up with the onslaught of newbies overwhelming their space. Everyone has been friendly, and I hope we Reddit refugees can be good neighbors.
Does this momentary overload impact the feed across instances? I was testing it today and was getting different feeds on different instances, even though I had the same settings ('all', active, hot, new comments, etc.). I had the impression that the 'all' feed would be the same in every instance, considering that they are federating somewhat the same instances.
I hope they will fix NSFW content plopping up on the "All" feed. Currently feddit.de decided to ban my lemmynsfw instance, because they didn't want the content mirrored on their sites and not flood the All frontpage. But it means I cannot interact with that instance for a technical flaw than bad policing.
I hope you are right, so far it's pretty clunky. I am here either way, as going back does not appear to be an option. However, the fediverse updating is taking on way more resources than I think the owners of these instances thought. Ours is updating with x5 more servers. I suspect that will help.