(De)centralisation of Lemmy communities in numbers

AMillionNames, 2 months ago (edited 1 month ago)

The biggest problem with “federation” is the control given to bullshit admins in some of the biggest and how big into hiding their problems they are. One of the biggest instances has shoved two of their admins under the rug, without openly acknowledging why they did it or the drama there clearly is behind it, giving the impression that the problems those admins were creating have been addressed on one side and on the other just trying to dismiss it as “no big deal, they are just taking time off”.

So keep in mind joining some of those instances is just joining a good paint job. Sometimes, the rust breaks through, sometimes the rusted pieces get removed, but the people painting over the rust are still there.

It matters because when communities crowd around large instances, those admins have ultimate control over participation within them. And while easy to bypass, it will still affect the reputation your comment history would have represented.

hamid, 2 months ago

I’m extremely grateful for all the work Ruud and his team has done to make Lemmy.world possible but I see the limitations in it that I didn’t understand 9 months ago when I started. My communities are all pretty small and I guess I can just start over but I wish there was a way to migrate my comm to a new instance with my subscriber lists and posts so that I can move my sillyness to a small well maintained instance

Blaze, 2 months ago

Hello,

I migrated a few communities in the past. Usually, it’s okay, except if you really have a lot of valuable content, it happens quite smoothly.

If people ask, it was from !dundermifflin to !dundermifflin

hamid, 2 months ago

How did you do that? Just cross posting everything?

Blaze, 2 months ago

Negative:

1. Ask the community if they would be okay to move. If there is a big backlash, just stay there.
2. Open the new community on the new instance, add the sidebar, the banner, everything to make it look like the previous one.
3. Post the the old community a link to the new community. Lock the old community.
4. Add a few posts to the new community to make the transition smoother

hamid, 2 months ago

Ah I see, that isn’t really what I had in mind, bummer. That to me is starting over which is I guess the plan. Thanks!

Blaze, 2 months ago

If you just cross post everything, most of the people will stay on the previous one

PoorPocketsMcNewHold, 2 months ago

Sadly still stuck on the OG lemmy.ml. Still waiting impatiently to be able to migrate my account to an another smaller instance.

yo_scottie_oh, 2 months ago

What’s so bad about lemmy.ml?

xor, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I assume the usual complaint, which is that it’s the one of the only major servers where tankies are prevalent.

That’s, of course, not to suggest that even a majority of its users are tankies or that there aren’t plenty of great communities there, but the users who are tankies seem to be almost entirely split between lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.

ada, 2 months ago

What do you mean waiting to migrate?

Post history migration will never be implemented. But you can already use apps to move over your subscribe lists etc.

Blaze, 2 months ago

With 0.19, you can even move your subscribe list in two clicks from the settings (you get a JSON file that you can import on another instance) without external apps

PoorPocketsMcNewHold, 2 months ago

Oooh :c

Kierunkowy74, 2 months ago

Now available as a table!

ticoombs, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Relevant: reddthat.com/comment/8316861tl;dr. The current centralisation results in a lemmy-verse theoretical maximum for of 1 activity per 0.3 seconds, or 200 activities per minute. As total transfer of packets is just under 0.3 seconds between EU -> AU and back.

Edit: can’t math when sleepy

ada, 2 months ago

Oh, now that’s fascinating, and explains some of the issues we’re having. Our hosting provider had some issues, so all of our queues were delayed. It took us a while to recover, but we got through all of the outstanding queues, except for lemmy.world, which still has a huge amount outstanding. And I’m guessing that’s because we’re processing them only slightly faster than new ones enter the queue!

ticoombs, 2 months ago

Since the 11th @ 9am UTC, LW has seen a 2 fold increase of activities. If my insider knowledge is right (and math) it’s 7req/s average up from 3req/s.

Lucky for both of us we are not subbed to every community on LW but I think we are subbed just enough to be affected.

muntedcrocodile, 2 months ago

The centralisation should be fine but definatly something to keep an eye on.

db0, 2 months ago

They ignored lemmy.dbzer0.com

Blaze, 2 months ago

How dare they!

poVoq, 2 months ago

I think they included it as “/0”

db0, 2 months ago

Oh right. That’s an interesting shortcut I didn’t think to look for. Or maybe it was edited in? I remember looking for piracy

Blaze, 2 months ago

Thanks for sharing, and happy to see two of the communities I’m posting to on Lemm.ee are mentioned there (!yurop and !movies )

The centralization on Lemmy.world can create performance issues. Reddthat has been having issues since LW upgraded to 19.3: grafana.lem.rocks/d/…/federation-health?orgId=1&a…, while they have no issues with SJW: grafana.lem.rocks/d/…/federation-health?orgId=1&a…

@ticoombs, our admin, is trying to figure out a solution, but it might require important rework of the Lemmy codebase

I’m thinking about asking a few communities I mod on LW if they could consider moving to another instance to spread the load.