The big user experience problem is everyone is getting funneled into Lemmy.world and Lemmy.ml, and they can’t scare fast enough.
But Lemmy is federated. So signup for a smaller instance. You’ll still be able to subscribe and post to communities on other instances.
Ha, I applied to two smaller instances and have heard nothing but radio silence. The smaller instances are of no help if they don’t let anyone in.
Fair point. Tye small one’s Re being hugged to death and aren’t letting any more people in, so people are gravitating towards the juggernauts, and the juggernauts are collapsing under their weight. 
Next couple weeks should be interesting
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My instance (civilloquy.com) has open sign-ups. ;)
I started on lemmy.ml but it was unusable for the past few days. Today I managed to get into programming.dev pretty quickly and it has been smooth sailing.
When I first joined, I never got a confirmation that my account had been accepted. After a few minutes, I just typed the username and password I used during registration and I was able to log in.
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try mine.
Good for you. I’d been trying that for months with no success. Finally .world let me in last week.
When I applied, I never got a notification that it got approved, but I could post and comment on that instance. So you might have been in a similar situation as me or the admins are still dealing with a large influx of people
Oh wow you’re totally right. I was just able to log into one that I had never heard from! Thank you, good call!
I was on world at first because I thought each instance was its own subreddit, so I went with the one with the most users! After a day and a half I somewhat understand instances now and have switched to a smaller one. Hopefully other reddit refugees will do it too.
Thanks for being so welcoming and patient with us. I’m really glad to be here.
What does it mean to say that Lemmy is federated?
Basically there are many different Lemmy servers. Http://lemmy.world Http://lemmy.ml Http://shit.just.works Etc etc
It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for. Most of them talk to one another. For example. Lemmy.ml people can subscribe to and read Lemmy.world communities.
Lemmy can also talk to other “fediverse” social media platforms like Kbin. You often see a lot of Kbin users in Lemmy comments.
I’m still wrapping my head around things so someone please correct me if I’ve got the wrong idea. But here’s how i see it:
It’s kinda similar to the “United States” being a large group of individual self contained entities (states/servers) with their own rules and resources while all being interconnected. You can live in New York (join lemmy.ml) and be fully part of the US (lemmy as a whole) and are totally free to travel to California (lemmy.world) in a car/airplane (whatever frontend/app you prefer) and hang out and participate there.
Instances can also decide to exclude themselves/other instances if they don’t agree with the rest of the group (Texas wanting to secede, the US wanting to chop off Florida into the gulf of mexico… sorry FL, only kidding, we love you)
If you feel like New York is too crowded, too much traffic on the roads, you can choose to live in Maine (a smaller less populated instance) instead and still be part of the group.
You can even dump a bunch of soil into the ocean and create your own state (hosting your own server) that can participate with the others, or choose to isolate yourself from the world and only allow participation on your island (North Korea?)
Apologies for the america-centric reply but it’s where i live and what I’m familiar with.
That’s where join-lemmy really missed out. They should have introduced a set of rules like join-mastodon where instances must have at least two admins, a clear code of conduct, and clear rules as to how they manage closedown. That way users would be reasonably safe in picking an instance at random. But they didn’t so everyone should go to safe choices like lemmy.world.
Everyone keeps saying to join the smaller instances, but the reason people aren’t is because they are harder to find and usually have application gates thrown up. Because you can’t apply through the app, and because I am on mobile, I don’t even know how many Instances I applied for and then forgot what the instance was even called by the time they may or may not have approved.
All of this needs to be laid out better from the get-go. Even simply listing a server strain metric or warning (even if it’s something admins set themselves) would be useful.
Unless it defederates like beehaw keeps doing.
What’s going on with beehaw? I’m a bit out of the loop.
Basically, due to the size and open registrations on some large instances, Beehaw admins decided to defederate because they didn’t have the manpower or systems in place to deal with the large volume of content.
I think I read that they have 4 people running everything and 2 aren’t techy.
All in all, they have some of the biggest communities for gay folks, Trans folks, and other minority groups. Lots of trolls from large open instances were shit posting lots of hateful crap in those communities.
The Lemmy’s mod tools are still kind of janky and they couldn’t keep pace with the toxic trolling, so they made the call to defederate from instances like Lemmy.world temporarily, until some new mod tools get built.
All the admins from the defederated instances get it and they all appear to be on the same page.
That said, users got pissed because beehaw has one of the best tech communities. So now people on Lemmy.world don’t have their posts / comments show up in those communities.
Basically, they had two shitty options, and they went with protecting the vulnerable minority.
It’s temporary.
Beehaw is a community that wants to create a specific type of experience for its users, it wants to create a safer space and has stricter rules.
I think it’s personally a non-issue that people get riled up about. They’ve temporarily defederated from lemmy.world because of the large spikes in new users and wanting to have the moderation tools necessary to handle that while keeping their community the way they want it.
There is a subset of new Lemmy users who think this experience needs to be Reddit 2.0, that it needs to be perfect and totally smooth for new users, or else it will fail?
Personally, I don’t agree. I don’t want Lemmy to be Reddit at all. In the last month, I’ve found that I didn’t realize just how bad my Reddit experience had become. I’m okay with the experience being a little rough around the edges here and adjusting together. It has become obvious based on how good my interactions were here. How solid and interesting the content was. I’m not fiending for my specific subreddits, I’m good to move on and find new areas to focus on the internet.
I have a separate account for Beehaw, all the iOS apps already have way way better functionality than the Reddit official app, I can seamlessly switch between accounts. It’s been absolutely amazing to see how much this site and experience has evolved in one month. I’m super excited for the future here.
I like the rough around the edges. Little tricks and nuances I’ve picked up. Makes it fun.
One thing I don’t miss is the “culture”… I hope this shift into the fediverse frees comment sections of the endless same dumb low effort puns, and even worse puns in the replies. Or fucking award speeches in comment edits, the same shitty jokes that nobody likes but somehow still perpetuate…
I really look forward to something new
I’m late to the conversation. Yeah, that’s what I hated about Reddit. I’ve been using it since 2009, and I noticed that it got progressively worse the moment they introduced karma.
Beehaw defederated from other instances as users were getting around bans by creating new accounts on those instances. The admins in question are talking about how to address this.
They are overly sensitive special snowflakes that pipi their pampers if anybody that doesn’t have 100% the same opinions as them is allowed to use the internet
Motives aside, the point is one account won’t always get you everywhere. Doing a little research before picking a home instance can’t hurt.
The real magic is that you don’t even have to use Lemmy. You can use Kbin if you like that interface better.
Still better than the official reddit app.
Smoke signals would be better than the official app.
Just not using the app is better than using the app.
I can’t fathom how they bought a good app, put a dev “team” on it for 7 years, and still don’t have half the features some neckbeards in their mom’s basements without access to the backeng still managed to put into their apps.
What a pack of incompetent fucks.
So true.
I want to be mad but FFS Reddit had Conde Nast money for most of its shittery so they had NO excuse except incompetence.
At least Fediverse servers are typically Steve’s old laptop or some shit so it’s understandable.
Like the good old times
Given the… frankly absurd rate at which people are signing up to servers, and subscribing to other servers, and posting and commenting and upvoting and…
I mean it’s getting a bit hairy, and user growth was already following a very steep growth curve. Reddifugees are hugging all instances to death.
Does the Narwhal bacon again?
Oh god
Only at midnight.
You gotta use lemmy.world for the OG experience 😂
Are all of the lemmy servers different? I just signed up on lemmy.world
Well, they are different server with different versions of lemmy running. But I think lemmy.world is running great again
It’s early days here. Give it some time…
It’s part of the charm :D
Agreed! Lemmy kinda captures the same sense of excitement and experimentation that the early internet seemed to have.
Not sure if this is meant to be negative or positive but I for one like all the growing pains and issues. It makes the whole experience a little more engaging for me. I really like reading up on what problems are happening and how the teams are working towards solutions. I especially like the technical details that are just a little over my head because it’s fun to learn about!
This is definitely a sink-or-swim moment for Lemmy. If this is going to work, this is the chance. Twitter and Reddit are imploding. Users have a reason to try something new and are willing to deal with young, buggy platforms because it’s better than the alternative and they needed an Internet home. My upvote taking ten seconds to register is itself the knife’s edge of creation, a new birth.
And here I am laughing on my speedy private instance. For real, the best part of Lemmy is if your experience is bad you can hop to a different instance and not miss a post
Question about this, is it just a speedier general browsing on other instances as well? Or just your local posts?
Everything is faster. For the most part, your local instance will download posts and comments for any community you (or anyone else on your instance) is subscribed to. So when you log in, you log into your server and browse the content locally (posts from everywhere) while your server in the background constantly is receiving updates through the ActivityPub protocol.
I literally have no delay in using Lemmy in any way.
What about the “all” stream? Is that also preloaded to the server?
The “all” stream would be all of the posts from the combined subs of the users on the instance. So if there’s a community nobody is subscribed to, it won’t appear on all. This is true of all instances. Many smaller ones will employ bots to crawl Lemmy and sub to communities to give the large instance “all” feeling.
That being said, yeah it’s all preloaded onto your local server. There is no difference in speed. Doesn’t matter if it’s active/subed or new/all they all load the same
I’d highly encourage everyone to find smaller instances and leave lemmy.world for the immediate expats. Find something that aligns with your values. Or if you are technically literate enough host your own instance. If you have an old desktop computer you’ve already got everything you need.
I should probably build an instance on my little home server. Is there a guide for that somewhere?
Right on the lemmy website. 🙂
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/administration.html
It can apparently take up a decent amount of space depending on how many communities you subscribe to.
I even got an error page the first time I tried to load this post. Just like old times! 🥲
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I wonder if anyone has been me
I have been you, SwallowsDick
Here’s Johnny!
Looks like the app wasn’t developed with a scalable architecture from the start, then they strapped some caching out of desperation when users started flocking, and didn’t consider the invalidation parameters for private pages correctly.
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Check out mlmym if you want to see it resemble the old.reddit experience too.
generic live instance
old.lemmy.world
old.lemmy.ca
githubTry lemm.ee instance. It is REALLY fast compared to lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works. And it is also general instance, not some theme-specific.
To be fair, lemm.ee has an entire order of magnitude less monthly users than world. I think it’s at the perfect size, actually.
Wait i have only been using lemm.ee, are you saying ive been lemming with 1 nut sack stapled to my leg?
No. Because of the federated nature of these servers, it just means you have a fast server ;)
If you’re on one of the bigger instances (lemmy.world for example) use https://lemmyverse.net/ to pick a smaller, less crowded instanceto call home.
I created an account on reddthat.com earlier today, and it’s way less laggy than lemmy.world (my initial instance).
Hopefully in time lemmy gains functionality thatmakis account backup/porting easy so moving instances in nbd.
Lemmy at least needs a feature like Mastodon to allow you to migrate your accounts to another instance.
Or even simpler, a feature that lets you aggregate history, posts, comments and subscriptions from multiple instances in a transparent way.
Sort of a meta-account / fedacount that tells all Lemmy instances that accounts a, b, c, and d are all the same user.
Doesn’t that kind of go against the idea of federation? I don’t know if it’s worth compromising on.
aggregating so many different cats community into one feed is a dream🤩🐱.
Right now i subscribe to 5 different technology@<instances>, but if i could create a custom community set according to my preferences then i could see all those 5 in one layout, without breadmaking and other contents breaking them up. the choice now is all posts from all communities or only one specific community.
aggregating so many different cats community into one feed is a dream🤩🐱
I can completely understand that :)
Maybe an option to make your own collections of communities? A function on the client side where you can apply tags, or something like that?
