I still don't understand how Lemmy works. I feel like my dad feels using a smartphone.
It’s annoyingly complex and causes massive amounts of traffic and high load on the server to run a Lemmy instance that federates with larger instances. So most people prefer having someone else doing it.
It is not what the meme is about. It's about everyone choosing the same instance instead of splitting evenly on several. People should just stop registering on .world and .ml
Everyone is on lemmy.world, which is why I'm blocking lemmy.world. I love peace and quiet.
I don't understand this meme.
As someone who runs their own Lemmy instance, I do. People tend to join up with large instances, thus making the whole "decentralised" aspect a bit ambivalent and the system more prone to single points of failure....
But I also understand why - while my instance indeed has lots and lots of resources still available - there are many real-life advantages of choosing instances with established mod- and admin teams and an active community.
there are many real-life advantages of choosing instances with established mod- and admin teams and an active community.
This is the thing here, like, for most casual users "decentralisation and spreading the load" is not just far down the list of priorities, it's literally nonexistent. Content, uptime, reliability, active moderation and low risk of the instance just disappearing one day is what they care about. It's unfortunate, but I really don't see a way around it.
The vast majority of lemmy users are on a couple massive instances: lemmy.world, lemm.ee, sh.itjust.works etc.
There are tiny instances which would be happy to host more users and are faster than the big ones but no one joins them because most people just hear of lemmy.world or whatever is being shared on reddit and join that.
LW is still at 19k monthly active users, it could split in half and each of those halves would still be above lemm.ee and it's 8k
We need some kind of subletting system. Package a stupid simple Raspberry Pi image with the minimal amount of configuration required for me to self host, and set up a fediverse based DNS and certificate authority. Make it stupid simple for a user like me to self host my traffic without needing to pay for a domain and sort out all of the requirements. Like I technically have money but don't control my finances and am heavily subsidized by family due to my situation and disability. I could probably set it up if I was super motivated but networking complexity is a rabbit hole that feels intentionally convoluted and a pain in the ass every time I mess with it. Locking down a Linux image with an immutable base and well configured PAM, SELinux, and automatic updating is equally daunting when a person has no experience or professional contacts familiar with the setup to ground one's understanding.
I don't see why we need to rely on the traditional internet infrastructure. We should be able to make something like fediverse.lemmy.user.j4k3 where we collectivise the address fediverse.lemmy, use it as a DNS server, and then distribute the traffic to individual servers.
I'm close with piefed. Their docker container can work on a pi 4 pretty easy. I had it on the pi and tried it on a big boy comp as well. Great performance on most servers.
Biggest issue is Lemmy.world just slammed the box and caused a huge issue in the queue.
Gotta set up your nginx juuust right
