Lemmy.ml and beehaw.org getting hammered with traffic because of spez ama
Both were down for me before, they seem to be up right now but just made this account on Lemmy.blahaj.zone (Henry is the name of my actual blahaj lol). It's probably because of the traffic influx from reddit refugees from the absolutely disastrous spez ama (where he doubles down on everything and doesn't apologize at all). Allegedly they're trying to suppress Lemmy mentions but I guess it's not working well enough lol
A good problem to have although long term we're going to have to figure out how to deal with these spikes in traffic.
It feels like user accounts need to be abstracted away from instances somehow. Federation means it's almost meaningless which instance you register with, and as integration between instances and other Fediverse apps gets better it will just become more and more meaningless. It should be possible to just "Join Lemmy" and have the servers behind the scenes handle spreading the load. You should be able to login to Lemmy from Beehaw.org or Lemmy.ml or any other Lemmy instance. The way it works at the moment is kind of like content is global but accounts aren't and it feels like it should be the other way around?
It'll balance out as more instances start up. I also joined blahaj. The flurry of activity gives me some vague sense of hope that most of the communities I followed on reddit will be able to restart on Lemmy.
Its almost too late, ive seen posts on several subs saying they're shutting down permanently due to the effective permanent removal of 3rd party mod tools and the misery of the 1st party apps. Reddit could be looking at a mass exodus a-la-digg. It remains to be seen how the fediverse will handle the mass influx of former redditors. If Spez has any shred of decency left he'd apologize profusely, return to a free API, and then beg the mods who are leaving to stay. Knowing capitalists, he absolutely will not.
I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go.
And at some point we also gotta think about how to organize the instances...legally, financially and technically.
For now I'm really happy at how the instance I'm on is run. But to be fair. I have no clue who is running it. I have no clue wether I'm going to agree with future decisions. I don't even know if it will be around next week. Maybe the owner just decides he has more important things in life to do (which is fair tbh).
The model that lemmy is based on gives us all the tools to organize instances however we want to. I really want to see community owned instances. Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.
I'm sure there are similar models of organization in other countries too.
While the other recommendation in the thread are good, I think they are hard to implement things that will take time.
A quick fix solution can be to add a button on join-lemmy which says something like 'Confused on where to join? click to join a recommended instance' that redirects to the sign-up of one of the recommended instances (there is already a list).
This will allow for load balancing and easier time for people to just come and join.
I haven't noticed at all, because I follow communities on lemmy.ml and beehaw.org from my own instance. I had this experience when Mastodon.social kept going down during major Twitter exodus phases. Federation is awesome.
I’m really curious to see how this will work out. Also very curious about being kinda at a start of the build up of a community. I know it’s not from “scratch”, but it’s still kinda exciting
This was enough for me to start my own instance. It's not too hard with ansible, and Lemmy being Rust it's not needing that much CPU or RAM.
And I'll invite my friends here too. If you're capable of running your own server, do it for your friends. Form small communities and you can always subscribe to the big server communities from your own service.
This is the same type of scandal like the pao one. Reddit changed completely after that and the massive bans of subreddits. Only that time nobody decided to leave. I hope we grow to millions strong here soon and Reddit becomes a forgotten shell
mastodon struggled with scaling in the beginning, everytime elon strung more than four syllables together. a lot of admins there didn't know what the spikes would do - this is not a criticism, i would have had no idea either - and most new users piled into one or two big instances, as is happening here.
the more tech-savvy of the initial waves migrated to smaller instances, the instance admins figured out where the pain points were, and i think there were changes to mastodon itself. i expect all of these are coming for lemmy, and it's going to be lumpy here for a while just as it was in masto.
having lived through that, i came into a smaller instance here immediately. federation issues here are a bit gnarlier than on masto, but i trust that also will be sorted.
I joined during the general influx so I don't have a good gauge but how much has lemmy grown since this whole debacle? How many users were here like a month ago?
At least he was honest enough to say that the sudden massive turnaround in their attitude to API pricing was their realisation they had the AI bros over a barrel.
Given how much of the content used in the existing models has been shown to have been scraped in violation of usage licences and copyright, anyone who is serious about developing new models is going to be scrabbling desperately to get access to good data sets.
The Reddit board now realise that charging through the nose for access to their API might generate them more money than all those annoying users ever have.
I've been looking at different Lemmy communities the second pushshift was down (and let's just say finding things on Reddit suddenly became a lot harder because the built-in search function is kinda limited in a bunch of ways), and just made my account today out of random chance essentially LOL
I also got a couple of "you broke reddit" pages trying to follow the post. So even reddit servers couldn't keep up with how made people are. And this is on a Friday, traditionally the day to do things you do not want noticed.