To support decentralization and spread, should lemmy.world close registration at some point to prevent a performance overload due to too many users? Of course, if registration is disabled, there could be a hint placed somewhere near that from other instances you can interact with content on lemmy.world just like you had registered on it. There could be a link to join-lemmys instance overview.
One of the great things about lemmy.world’s insane user count growth is actual live stress testing of Lemmy software. Instead of having an open question of how Lemmy might scale with large instances, there’s now real world production systems providing that opportunity.
The technical issues will pass, but the notion that merely spreading out the load will alleviate them is probably just treating the symptom than the cause.
I suppose from my PoV I see this as very much live testing in production and have adjusted my expectations around that instead of anticipating a wholly seamless experience.
We’re already seeing the development move forward thanks to it. Today’s updates made a huge difference in .world performance.
yes, limiting users is one tool to encourage users to find another “home” instance that they normally use to browse and post so that the system as a whole can scale better
I’m not sure. But maybe it makes sense to sign up to more than one instance.
My main account is on lemmy.world, but now I’ve signed up to another one on aussie.zone. I can see all the content from there and it’s nice and fast unlike world at the moment.
It feels kind of like I’m experiencing a benefit of federation, when I can simply switch accounts and keep browsing when things slow down on one instance.
Making it difficult for people to abandon reddit and join lemmy at THIS stage would be a bad idea. I think it has to scale.
Eventually if it successfully catches on and becomes the popular option, maybe. But even then I think I’d prefer a (or several) round-robin type options for joining. I think the server names are too exposed in lemmy to be easily understood by the masses. Like I get it but I’m a 20 year dev. Not a person in my family understands.
At the early stages no. It is vital we keep it open to get as many people through the door to promote fediverse. Eventually some people will create accounts in other instances.
Maybe it would be a good idea to put up a request for people to register elsewhere, but honestly, where? Randos naturally gravitate to large servers so if the largest one closes, it gets confusing unless there’s one that is ready as a direct replacement.
People figured out everyone doesn’t need to use the same exact X to have access to the same things X provides many times throughout civilization. Maybe the join page needs to communicate it better, but also people need to try to figure it out.
Personally I registered in lemmy.world not knowing any better. I would migrate my account to another instance in a heartbeat if it was possible.
It’s been three days. Do it while you’re fresh. You won’t regret it. Responsiveness is worth losing 3 days of points.
This won’t improve responsiveness when interacting with lemmy.world communities though right?
It will. I have no lag on my accounts that aren’t on overran servers. And I mostly interact with content from overran servers.
My Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml accounts can barely upvote without delays.
Alright thanks for the info 🙃
It actually does. Switched to a smaller instance, got full speed experience
I think strategic, times windows where sign ups are paused, in order to help distribute users, might be necessary. I don’t think that’s optimal for user experience, but I feel like if volume of sign ups stays where it is, that it’s probably needed.
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I get the point, but that limits the users’ right to select which community they want to join. I feel that is more important than preemptive decentralization of content. Hopefully there is a way to migrate communities from one instance to another. Should an instance get too large that would be a good feature to mitigate risk.
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Depends on server loads and scaling.
If the engineer(s) and admin(s) running things can handle the costs associated with growth then I think it should stay open. However at a certain point the load on the infrastructure, sysadmins, and cost make that untenable.
It’s not cheap to run this kind of stuff. I know that first hand because of my career running HPC clusters and running them in cloud environments.
I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what this must be costing and I’m really thankful that someone is putting in the thankless labor of love. That’s why I canceled my Reddit premium and started donating to this instance to help with that in some way. The only other way I could help is donating my time & experience. But I think they need money more than engineers lol
The TL;DR is that if we want to keep these things online we need to donate money (and/or time/labor).
It’s already laggy and unstable. Maybe more hardware and improved software will help, but it might just be hard for lemmy to grow.
It’s not hard for Lemmy to grow at all. Use a different server. There’s no upside to being on a crowded server. Join a fast and reliable server. Hit “all.” Done.
Lemmy is designed to grow easily.
No
It makes sense to pause registrations if an instance is actively overloaded, but there’s no reason it can’t keep growing if more hardware is added and the performance issues are resolved.
Some of the issues might be on the software side, so it’ll take some time until it can scale to more hardware resources. But yeah, I agree! What scares me more is the monetization path. Servers can become a really expensive.
With a larger userbase comes more people willing to donate, so it will depend on whether that revenue stream grows faster or slower than the increasing server costs. Mastodon.world has run fine on donations alone but lemmy.world will soon outgrow it so we’re entering uncharted territory for Ruud. Mastodon.social is significantly larger but I believe they also have sponsors and grants to complement the donations.
