Lemmy.ml and beehaw.org getting hammered with traffic because of spez ama

yeah, that ama convinced me it was time to take the plunge. just created this account, first comment on lemmy lol

first comment on lemmy
From kasirate@kbin.social
Lol. There's gonna be a lot of heads exploding when people realize what the fediverse is and how it works.
- I don't even understand, myself. ATM I have one kbin account and a few Lemmy accounts. Not sure if there is an advantage to having an account on a kbin instance vs a Lemmy instance or anything??
  At the moment, Jerboa seems like the best way to browse (although nowhere near as polished as many of the bigger Reddit apps obviously), so it seems pike picking a compatible instance with that works best right now. Still, it's all a bit overwhelming!
same, I created a kbin account. this is my first comment 👋
- Welcome to kbin! I’ve been here about a week and the community and content is great. I hope you like it too, great choice!
- Hello from Lemmy! Federation is neat.
welcome to kbin!
Hell yes, welcome!
Welcome!
Same here, this is also my first kbin comment.
- Welcome to the fediverse! Have fun exploring all it has to offer!
Welcome!

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?

- I like the sound of this, just unsure how this would be able to authenticate an account on behalf of a home instance that's down, in a trustworthy way.
  I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Lemmy and the Fediverse, so the following is based on similar implementations I'm familiar with...
  SSO implementations usually require the website the user originally registered on (home instance) to confirm the account is real and authenticate it, and in most cases a new user account is automatically created using the SSO authentication details (this would prevent the user from appearing as if they're using their home instance).
  To achieve what you want, I think we'd need some kind of way to export the user account and any signing keys used to prove the user is who they claim to be in the fediverse, and then re-import those to another instance. I'm not too sure if SSO would be able to achieve it if the home instance is down.
  On the flip side, I'm pretty sure SSO with a Lemmy instance that is active could work. While it would bring a lot of benefit to less tech-savvy users, and a lot of convenience to us when we're given a threadiverse link to another instance, from a technical perspective I think that would be a challenging implementation. Users would need to be careful about having their credentials phished on a malicious instance too
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.
IMO, this couldn't be further from the truth. Different communities have different priorities, principles, and technical requirements, and will take different approaches to controversy. Some communities are low-profile and laid back. Others are magnets for abuse and may require additional moderation, and even technical changes, like disabling image embeds (as one example) to mitigate harassment. Some are filled with avid shitposters, while others insist on the utmost degree of civility. Some have advanced requirements for operational security. Some want broad access to the network, while other would prefer a quiet corner. Some might be focused on video and require an instance that can handle the additional bandwidth and storage requirements.
Who hosts your instance is important. The jurisdiction your instance is housed in is important. If a community requires special accommodations for accessibility or other reasons, that is important. If you need moderators / admins who understand your native language, that is important. If an instance wants to go above the technical level and do things like verify users (kinda like journa.host) that makes an important distinction from your typical instance.
In the beginning, we won't know who's trustworthy, but this is the Internet. There will be controversies, and we will see how various admins respond to these controversies. Over time, they will gain reputations, both good and bad. It is best if somebody who already has a good reputation, like a respected mod from another community is able to operate the new home for that community.
For now, it probably doesn't matter where you end up, but as time passes, it is good to keep an ear to the ground and see how things develop. Eventually you will find a solid niche. This is a problem even the fanciest join-xyz-fediservice website can't really solve, but it is meaningful.
- The one thing that I don't like is that you can't change your home instance. I signed up for Lemmy without knowing anything about it, and I mean I knew absolutely ZERO about how it works. Therefore, I just clicked on a random instance because I didn't even know what an instance was, and I signed up. So what if I joined the wrong one for me? What if it turns out to be shit? I Guess I could just sign up for a different one with a different login, but wish there was an option to jump to a new one with your same login if you wanted to.
- yeah agree with you here. i was explaining this concept to my other half who doesn't understand tech but did say this approach makes a lot of sense.
it's like email. You need a server somewhere to hold your inbox. They should make an easy way to migrate your user to another instance, though.
- Some kind of aliasing
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?
User accounts can be independent of anyone else's instance. You just have to host your own.
But it's always going to be much more convenient to register your account on someone else's instance, than to set up your own. Even if instance setup was made to be as effortless as possible, and single-user instances were made to be as lightweight as possible, say you download and run a single binary onto your computer that runs a lemmy instance and everything is automatic from there, most people still wouldn't want to do that.
The idea that you should be able to log in to your account from any instance is...less practical than you might think.
The technical reasons why are hard to boil down into an easy explanation. But the very short version is that everything comes with pros and cons. Doing it this way makes it a little less convenient for users, and a little harder to make a good UX for. Doing it another way could make it more convenient, at the cost of making it very easy for a bad actor to do things like post fake content under another user's name, or could add inconvenience somewhere else, like making it so that users have to manage a private key instead of or in addition to their username and password.
I do think there's room for improvement, but I think the overall idea of logging in and interacting with content specifically via the instance you're registered with is ultimately very unlikely to change.
- It would also be cool to be able to not have communities be locked to where they're created or at least make them mobile.
  I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
  Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
This is something that made me stop using Mastodon, too many instances with bad method of connecting them. I'd much prefer that instances aren't seen to the user (I wouldn't mind somewhere with the text "this community is hosted by X on server Y"). But seeing @username@instance is weird and many Reddit refugees won't have any idea what does it mean. I mean, the concept of federated network is complex already.
I've also encountered a lot of bugs in my short time of use which I'd like to see fixed, but I'm not sure where can I report them, or to see if they are reported already.
Noo. Instances are responsible for moderating their users because if you have bad users all coming from one instance then you’ll get defederated, but instances will also defederate each other when drama happens.

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.

Nah, read the AMA. He and Reddit (the company) in general are doubling down. I was hoping it was just anchoring (where the initial price for something is so ridiculously high, any other offer even if it's more than you should pay seems reasonable). But from his comments, and the Devs' responses, it's clear it's basically just a way to kill the API totally for users, I guess the only possible remaining use for the API is AI training. Tech companies would probably pay that much because it genuinely is worth it to them.
- Yeah, I saw the comment he made about the Apollo developer. He's lying plainly, without even trying to refute any claims made against him and his team. He really believes the company can stand to float on a more mainstream userbase. I doubt it honestly. More likely it will start a slow trend downwards as the mods are mostly leaving, so the site will have to deal with massive site wide content moderation and community management issues. He doesn't care. Maybe he's already checked out and he plans to step aside once this transitory phase is over.
  The idea that reddit can survive purely on a mainstream userbase is ludicrous anyway, the entire point of the website has always been its many niche communities. Its ecosystem of interconnecting and interacting user groups. Thats never going to be a big sell to pure social media oriented users, who already have Instagram and TikTok to fulfill their algorithm needs. So financially I have no idea how they plan to survive in the long term.
I joined vlemmy.net today .. I think it said there was 1 other user when I joined lol. No idea what I'm doing but so far it seems like I can see all the content from other instances as well.
- Yep! The idea behind federation is that there are a bunch of smaller instances that can all talk to each other rather than one big central authority like with Facebook or Reddit!

I didn't wait for the AMA to get hammered

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.

I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I'm seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they're missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)
I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn't hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.
- I do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can't really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it's integral to what it is trying to acheive.
  What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. "Default servers" could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: "This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people".
  Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.
  Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.
- I think that with the growing popularity of Lemmy and kbin the registration process will naturally become more intuitive over time. Especially on the short term I expect a lot of tweaking to happen.
- In regards to email; the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of "security".
  It's not a 'natural state of being' : up until relatively recently you could easily run your own email server (and most businesses and huge numbers of people actually did), but it's been co-opted and broken very thoroughly by Google and Microsoft to their benefit.
  With the Fediverse, you probably don't actually want giant servers, as you're just repeating the concentration of users and thus power in the network into a smaller, fewer set of hands.
Regional servers are great, especially when it comes to regional laws and customs which people generally want applied (for example UK has quite strong Hate Crime laws, I’m sure DE does too).
I do think however, in early stages, I’d rather know who is running my instance and a few of their personal opinions. For example, are they going to defederate with an instance I quite like because of politics? We are really in early days here and these instances are very unstable whereas the mastodon instances have all been around with thousands of users for quite a time.
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.
If someone wants to go ahead, count me in.
There are a lot of instances popping up at the moment and we'll see many of them disappear again over the coming weeks. Prepare to move around a bit before things stabilise somewhat.
I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go
This is pretty much how I sign up to stuff in the Fediverse. Since I'm in Europe I look for any of the closest english-speaking instances with a local CCTLD and sign up there - however this time I decided against it because I couldn't figure out who operated lemmy org uk (my preferred instance before it disappeared). Ended up joining lemmy.one instead and happy with that decision!

Shamelessly plugging my https://lemmy.cafe instance.

Signed up! I do think it needs to be linked still though
- You don't have to sign up for every instance you want to.
  I can see that you're currently signed in to your lemmy.ml instance, for example, and if you go there and search for a community in another instance, like gaming@beehaw.org, you'll be able to view and interact with that community without ever leaving your instance.
  So it is already linked in a way. Go ahead and try it out with some communities you've seen in other instances.

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.

This will mean that the 'most recommended' instance will get absolutely hammered with new registrations though. Some randomisation should be necessary.
- But not too random, since some instances ate brand new and there's no guarantee they'll stay up, which might put off new users looking for something stable.

Remember folks, even if you do or don’t like Lemmy it is an alternative that appreciates the increased interest.

It also has something Reddit has been losing. Which is the small town feel. More people now even migrate to discord from Reddit. There was a time when on Reddit I felt like real people interacted. Now it all feels astroturfed.
Also, if they are suppressing mentions via Reddit just mention it on discord

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.

Can you tell me more about the pros and cons of running your own instance? Why did you choose to do that? I'm new at this so I'm very intrigued.
- Of course. Here's a quick one:
  Pros:
  You don't depend on anyone else's funds or time
  Always available and snappy no matter how busy some parts of the Fediverse get
  You choose who to federate with. Want to talk to both puppy-lovers and puppy-haters? No problem.
  It's a social media account you really, in every sense of the word, own. Nobody can take it away from you. The lemmy.ml admins could accept the billions* they're surely being offered right now for their instance, but my account is still mine.
  Cons:
  Hosting costs some money, knowledge, and time.
  Unless you subscribe to specific communities (or people, in the cast of Mastodon) those posts will never reach your server. So you don't really have a "Federated" timeline
  *I'm joking about the billions. Probably.

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

It is isnt it
- It is :)
Same. Most things in life I can say I really wasn't there from the beginning but this I really think I can lol. I hope I just don't do the "before it was cool" hipster thing

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.

That'll give me a use for my TrueNAS server that's for sure. It's got 24 cores 200gb of RAM and I basically use it exclusively for a NAS.
Now I just have to look into how to set it up.
- As long as you get a public IP address, a domain name and TLS certificate, you can federate with other servers.
  I run mine in a small Hetzner box. Two gigabytes of RAM, two AMD cores, it's almost like doing nothing even I'm federating a ton of messages all the time regarding the logs.
Don't ban lemmygrad and we'll be happy.
- I actually just subscribed to one of your communities.
There should be a thread for this(starting a instance)
- Here, I started one: https://lemmy.ml/post/1201750

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

Only that time nobody decided to leave.
Well, they did, but it was the r/FatPeopleHate folks who left. But they jumped ship to voat, which doesn't even exist anymore.
- I remember a lot of regular redditors going to voat during that debacle. Voat seemed amazing for a while. The trouble was that voat couldn't handle the influx very well and couldn't solve the frequent outages, so most of the people who migrated bounced back to reddit. Then voat started showing how friendly they were to migrants from subs like /r/FatPeopleHate, which drove the remaining "well adjusted" people back to reddit.
- I wonder where are they now

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.

kbin.social is also suffering

sorry it just has the best UI out of the one's i've tried, i didn't mean to kill it v-v
- We're glad to have ya, regardless!
- I agree, the integration of microblogs + threads is brilliant and I hope people keep using it.
Yes, it was working ok before the AMA, now it's feeling sluggish. I guess is expected considering the amount of people coming over. New users are all welcome, and we're glad to have you.
- Hmm I fully understand why, but every page on most instances (I've been on a few different ones) is taking a while to load (nowhere near as long as the billion dollar website Reddit takes to load their "official" website though, lol.)
- Yeah just made a kbin (I have a lemmy too, but found I liked kbin's ui more) and it's been a bit slow. I figure it's cause the ama went so badly!

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?

a month ago it was like around 400-500 online users, today is 2300

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.

Aha This explains why things have been slow or wonky at times

Maybe we should agree on a default landing server, and throw it on a scaling AWS instance?

I looked around for an instance like a landing server and found lemm.ee. The admin advertises the intention of this instance to be something like a landing server, so maybe direct confused people to there and let them explore after settling in?
- I'm curious though, is the intention of the federation also that you move onto different instances later on? As you should be able to access everything from everywhere anyway, this should not be necessary I presume?
You could also just have a website that 1. Selects a random instance from the ones currently available and up and 2. Shows all instances and whether they are up or down. This would encourage new users to not all pile on to the same instance.
I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff (what's a docker? What's a kubernetes? Lol) but I don't think as of right now with Lemmy, kbin, etc you can just throw a bigger single server at the problem. Anyways, that's kinda against the purpose of decentralization anyway. I know you're supposed to pick a server based on what one you like, rules or whatever but right now they're pretty much all equivalent (except lemmygrad, lol)
- Surely not a random instance. Lots of instances are niche or have more strict requirements on the user, even if they're public.
  I'm saying again, there should be a way for instances to better propagate their interests/philosophy/politics/communitues and for the user to pick one based on that.
- https://join-lemmy.org/instances
  Should work for that, they just need to have a good newbie page with a curated selection of generic servers at the top, with a random one selected, maybe based on location?
- Is the instances really a major barrier to entry, It seems no different to me than picking an Email provider.

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

Also my timing was so perfect that just as I tried to log in after getting the confirmation email, it went down. Needless to say I was kinda scared that I did something for a second before realizing that was rather unlikely

Good news overall

reporting for duty to join the revolution. thank you for hosting us!!

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.

They never had to do the AMA in the first place. It's baffling really, there were absolutely ZERO good outcomes for Reddit here.
Considering his several passive aggressive statements about Apollo over the course of the AMA, and the sheer irrationality for him to do it at all and especially to double down, I can only assume this is all fueled by egotistical rage.
- I honestly find the constant digs at Apollo developer baffling. Spez is clearly looking for a scapegoat, but after the second or third time Christian showed the receipts, you'd think he'd find another target...
  Instead he is digging himself and reddit deeper and deeper into that hole - seems ego really is a hell of a drug.
- I'm wondering the same.
  I mean, anyone with a bit of sense knew beforehand the AMA would have been a disaster, it actually turned out to be even worse than many people imagined.
  At first I thought he wanted to do it anyway to play victim, something like "see?? I wanted to talk they didn't listen!"
  But seeing how utterly stupid his answers were, I couldn't make any sense of it, you're probably right, "egotistical rage" is the only logical answer at this point.

Also come to reddthat.com if you need another instance option.