Almost definitely, it’s hard to imagine there’s a community on lemmy.world that not one of the 20k users have susbcribed to

Pretty much any of the top 5 instances already subscribe to each others communities. Definitely not missing out on lemm.ee either!

One can easily get around that by simply subscribing to more communities!

It’s actually really bad. With how big it is, it’s now the default for even new mobile applications, which means it will now only grow bigger. 5x is just the start. We are just seeing the start of the centralised decentralised Lemmyverse.

too late, going to register on lemm.ee now!

Is it really federated social media now though? With how much .world has grown, they could disable federation and be their own walled garden.

Like, they have nearly 5x more active users than .ml at this point, how ridiculous is that?

I agree, but it’s too late now. Even Sync defaults to the .world instance, and at this rate, they’ll only grow bigger.

You want to defederate from the largest Lemmy instance, the poster child, and the mascot of Lemmy? Good luck. They are Lemmy now.

At present, I don’t think it does, which is a shame.

Well, it’s their instance, they can do what they want with it. You should definitely save your $ and setup your own instance so you can federate with whatever you want.

hopefully not, they do have a good portion of communities.

inb4 lemmygrad

he’s an astroturfer though, is he really low enough to stoop to ddos? thankfully the fediverse is diverse and resilient to attacks to any one instance lol

One good way would be HTTP response times from the API, since that is not something that would be cached by Cloudflare at the edge.

That’s a terrible justification. lemmy.world is using Hetzner, and not a CDN whereas lemmy.ca is using Cloudflare, which is a CDN. Pinging is a terrible benchmark for comparing server performance.

That is still the 7th largest instance. I’m glad it still works out for you, but I’m still not a fan of how the entire fediverse can be summarised in the top few instances.

How about no? No instance in the fediverse should grow as unsustainably as lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. People should naturally diversify into the smaller instances because that is what a federated Lemmyverse is supposed to be about.

is it just me, or is your instance system time on Lemmy… 2 hours late?

That is such a take.

The point of federation means that even an instance with just a handful of users, can participate in larger communities on other servers that may have thousands of users. From that thousands of users, may also include handful of users FROM other instances. That’s the beauty of federation. While a community needs to be on one instance, the people do not.

I’m on a server with <50 users, and yet I’m still subscribed to the larger communities, and enjoying in delightful conversations with people such as yourself. Why am I on server with <50 users? Simply because it performs better, and through the magic of federation, doesn’t require me to have to register to a server halfway around the globe just because everyone else is there too.

I have no idea what led you to believe that there’s no use-cases for smaller instances, and I would definitely like to hear the arguments behind it.

Again, for the purposes of smaller Lemmy instances (< thousand users), there is hardly a requirement for any kind of load balancing. Having one, is my definition and rationale for calling it fancy. It’s over-engineering a solution that is not a problem for majority of instances. Your arguments thus far would apply to larger Lemmy instances, even Reddit-lite, but that’s not what federation is about. It’s not a bunch of large instances forming a fenced community and gatekeeping the tiny ones out.

Er, because we should all be working together to try to help Lemmy grow and be stable…?

I agree with this point, but I disagree with the context in which you mentioned, “They should post their clustered setup so others can replicate more easily”, right as a reply to my original comment asking how Ruud felt about the centralisation of users in a federated application. This should’ve been an entirely separate reply, or perhaps an issue on GitHub to the Lemmy authors.

You can run on a single box, but a single problem will bring down your single box. This is a basic problem commonly discussed in DevOps circles.

Again, I agree, but the context in which you mentioned it, basically suggests that everyone who runs single instance Lemmys are doing it wrong, which I disagree.

Lowering the entry requirements is part of how we can get wide-spread adoption of federated software. Not telling people that they have to have at least 2 instances with redundancies or they are doing it entirely wrong.

The bare minimum I would ask anyone running their own instance, is to have backups. They don’t need fancy load-balancers, or slaved Postgres database setups, or even multi-node redis caches for their instances of sub-thousand users.

For example, one reasonably priced server on most providers is like $20-40/month. Say a load balancer as a service is another $10-20, and a database server or database as a service is also like $20-$40. A distributed, redundant setup would be like 2 webservers, a database, and a load balancer so like, $70?

Seriously? That may be an acceptable price tag for a extremely public Lemmy host, like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml, but in no way should it be a reasonable price tag for the vast majority of Lemmy instances setup out there. Especially when most of them have sub-thousand users. $70/mo? That has to be a joke. You can easily host a Lemmy on a $5-$10 droplet for ~100 users.

I’ve deployed clustered applications myself, I just haven’t looked into doing it with Lemmy and was curious if they had a run book or documentation.

No offense, but you definitely seem like the kind of person to shill for cloud-scaling and disregard cost-savings.