I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.
All fine and dandy, but don’t just pick a random one close to you. Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don’t even require an email address to sign up.
Like if you are ginger or not
Pfft - everyone knows you need a soul to get online
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn’t say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you’re behind CG-NAT you don’t get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don’t think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
I am aware of how a public facing IP address works, and how little information it does give, by itself. It is still a privacy concern, and can be used in conjunction with other data to launch social engineering attacks or to help narrow down other data.
IP address doesn’t mean anything, really.
The biggest issue is that you’re giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?
You don’t need to provide an email address to sign up at most of the big instances. I think lemmy.world is the exception. Even your instance lemmy.ca does not require an email address.
If you really want to provide one, you could use a service that does email forwarding. Some examples are https://simplelogin.io (owned by Proton Mail), and Firefox Relay (Owned by Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser). These both have free tiers. There is also https://duckduckgo.com/email/ from the people who make the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. That one I believe gives you unlimited new randomised email addresses for free. Very low attachment size limit but great for something like Lemmy.
You’re right that you don’t have to on most large instances, and that you can make burner email accounts if you have to.
But this post was simply about telling people to be careful of smaller, less known instances. The links you provided are excellent ways to protect yourself, even outside of Lemmy.
Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
Close to you helps in general, it’s not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
Agreed that close helps in general but 200-300ms isn’t really that noticeable unless it’s something where latency is important. I’m also surprised that some of the larger instances aren’t using Cloudflare for caching. If things like images etc… are cached all over the world then I doubt anyone would notice any speed issues.
300 ms is a lot for a website. It feels slow. Cloudflare could help with traffic but I think the main culprit here is the database.
Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as “preferably”
Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least
There are feature requests on the gethub for Lemmy to add the ability to move users and communities between instances. It comes up often enough it’s just a question of how to implement it and when.
What do you mean? Why would you need to migrate your account?
In order to switch instances hosted on a different server, but keep your account history such as comments, votes, posts, saved posts, etc.
Only way to switch instances right now is to make a new account from scratch on that instance.
But you can still view and interact with all content on any federated instance so why would you need another account?
I have already setup my main account with subscriptions I like and I would ideally liked to keep my posts / comments…?
I second this request, I’ve created at least 5 accounts in different instances since I migrated.
Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?
For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!
I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.
The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it’s easier to search. The instances also aren’t 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.
Yeah, Lemmy being in a very “alpha” state makes some of the things a user wants to do difficult.
Yeah, that will be nice if you can migrate your name to other instances… Cheers!
Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community
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Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.
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From what I understand about Lemmy, the only way to disable signups completely is by defederating. Meaning, you would not be able to view other communities from other Lemmy instances like .world or beehaw.
To get around this, you can switch to application signup like beehaw and just ignore/reject every application but this would also mean that anyone can view your instance as a guest. Like you can go to lemmy.world and view posts and comments without logging in
Atleast, that’s what I understand. Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
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It’s absolutely your right to do so
How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
You can click the “use map” button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can’t find a instance that you like that is close don’t worry. Because server closeness doesn’t matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.
Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.
Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!
Can you create Lemmy accounts on Mastodon servers?
Yeah this doesn’t show lemmy instances? Only mastodon and other weird shit.
If you go to the drop down menu at the top, you can specify what you are looking for. Select “all” and Lemmy will be on the list.
I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.
You’ll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I’ll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)
So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)
Do you have any advice on how to find one? Especially the “local to you” part?
You can check this list and find an instance hosted in/close to your country.
Thank you!!
Useful. From this I find my instance is hosted in Russia. I should probably find another one closer to me
I’m hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I’m open to a few public users.
Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.
Isn’t 18.1 already live?
It’s in release candidate (rc.9) so fairly mature but not technically released.
For people still looking for an instance close to their location: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.
Is moving instances a thing or would you need to sign up from scratch?
AFAIK you need to sign up from scratch. But I’m pretty sure Lemmy devs will work on that. It’s already a thing on Mastodon.
There’s a script already in development by an enthusiast https://sh.itjust.works/post/693061
Currently Lemmy doesn’t support account migrating but it is technically possible afaik. It might get added in future but currently you have to sing up from sracth. Hovewer I would say having a Lemmy.world account in addition is probably a good call.
