Just another Reddit refugee

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I agree, it is a bit confusing - and as you’ve seen, isn’t quite optimal yet.

    My concern with having an ability to migrate entire communities, is that the hosting instance takes the brunt of the load of the community. I’m envisioning a scenario where, let’s say Lemmy.ml is hosting a number of large community, and one community explodes - say, “funny.” Say it gets absolutely massive. Lemmy.ml is running out of capacity and either has to grow vertically, which is a cost to the owner, or it can migrate a community (or cluster of communities) to another instance that has the capacity to host it - this distributes the load.

    Ideally, this will not be an issue for many years. Maybe the backend can be written as a sort of “raid5” across cooperating instances, both for load distribution/balancing and for high-availability. Who knows, I’m not a dev, and I have no doubt it would be a massive undertaking. But it’s not difficult to foresee problems down the road as the fediverse grows - especially if/when there’s a massive Reddit migration. 🤷‍♂️


  • I currently have 3 - one here, one on sh.itjust.works, and one on kbin.social. I did this for a number of reasons:

    1. If something happens to one instance, especially during growing pains where user influx is indistinguishable from a DDOS, I’ve got a “backup” where I can still be active from.

    2. These three (and beehaw, but I’m still waiting for approval over there) seem to be the larger (and/or fastest growing) instances - currently there’s an issue with Lemmy where if you “click-through” to a community on another instance, the authentication doesn’t carry - so you have to copy the link, return to your “home instance” and search for the link, then you can visit via your home instance and interact. Clumsy (but hopefully corrected eventually). By having an account already on these instances, clicking through isn’t a problem because I’ve got an account over there. (Note: I’m not talking about interacting with posts across instances, that works fine).

    3. Kbin.social showed me that instances can have a different “look-and-feel” from each other. While Lemmy.ml, sh.itjust.works, and beehaw are all clones of each other, Kbin has a prettier UX. Until apps start showing up, the homepage of your chosen instance is how Lemmy will look for you across the fediverse.

    4. Different instances have different home feeds, for some reason. I would expect that all settings being equal (view from all instead of local, or view subscribed and having the same subscriptions on each instance) they should all return a similar feed - but they don’t. Not sure why, if my understanding about how this all aggregates together works - I’m still testing.

    5. Different instances have different philosophies and different rules - some allow porn (but most don’t, and even on the ones that do I haven’t seen any yet - and yes I have NSFW enabled). But I also don’t want to end up with a home-instance that’s another echo chamber of one certain point of view - and while communities from those instances can be filtered individually, it’d be nice to have a local instance that’s already not an echo chamber.

    6. It’s still early enough that I’m not “married” to a particular instance yet, so now is the time to experiment and test. And since there’s no way (yet) to migrate an account, settings, subscriptions from one instance to another, now’s the time to explore and branch out and look around before I really get settled-in.

    Edit: and apparently numbered points don’t work. Good to know.