I originally chose to make my account on lemmy.world since all the content seemed to come from there. But I’ve since learned that I can fill my feed with stuff from any instance so it feels like it doesn’t actually matter if I’m on lemmy.world or not. At the same time, Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack so I’m wondering if I should change instance but have no idea what I should even be looking for when choosing.
smaller instances give you more control over your feed generally but discovery is on you.
i do expect better filters and controls in the future
Would a smaller instance not be more likely to have weaker support, or more prone to shutting down and taking you with it?
that all depends on the instance. small does not mean it will go away. for example my instance is topical. by design, even if it gets “popular” it has some in-built upper limits and if the mass grows beyond them it means I can likely get help paying for the next steps up.
just because an instance is big does not mean its necessarily safe or stable, first its imporant to note that large instances have scaling issues as the deployment for the system is not ready to scale that way, instead they need to deploy to every bigger servers in an inefficient manner or spend a ton of time rolling bespoke deploys. these big servers are just a few volunteers. some big instances are managed by 1-4 technical people, the same numbers a small instance has.
Also it costs money to run large scaled systems, you can run an instance for you and some friends for nearly free if you find a deal and only a few bucks a month if you dont.
So big instance/ small instance does not mean much with stability, they both have thier issues. Something to note, smaller instances are MUCH easier to run.
It feels like starting a new instance is the trendy thing to do, similar to creating some new crypto shitcoin a few years ago. Of course, nothing is guaranteed, but I would imagine more deeply rooted instances would generally offer more support and be less likely to disappear.
haha no, instances like this pre-date centralized systems, e-cash and everything else. instead of something hip and new, you are doing something very old, like they way the internet was designed to operate old.
i was running sites like these a decade before reddit came to the fore. The thing that’s “new and weird” is this desire to pile onto a single domain handing control of your feed, personal information and more to a billionaire. If you are into wealth gospel i get it, though they haven’t done as much to earn trust as people seem to think.
AOL and Compuserve went under for all the same reasons the majors are struggling now.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m onboard with these decentralized platforms. I’m not questioning the value of this federation system, but the potential volatility of parts of it. The concept of an '‘instance’ may be old, but that seems to be a new buzzword, fit for abuse.
it already has been abused, you came here a bit late and missed the fireworks, there was a massive expulsion of badly behaving instances by many of the instances wanting to remain connected. I was actually quite surprised and impressed at the speed at which admins collectively decided and acted across the network. I actually suspect the ratio of mods:users to be higher here. The ratio of admins:users def is.
They might have smaller supports, but they are much less likely to be targets of ddos attacks and bots.
Mine is very prone to this because I’m running it myself and I’m a dumbass
I don’t know, man. I think you could run the fediverse if you put your mind to it.
So far I’ve managed to
Generally, yes, though technically it can happen to any instance with a small or single-person admin team. If an instance has multiple admins it is far less likely that it will one day just die.
I’d rather rely on myself than someone else. I love my micro droplet instance. It feels nice knowing I am in control. [Somewhat].
I do feel like looking for a small instance is better from what I’ve read so far, but this is the first time I’ve heard control over my feed being different by instance, outside of instances defederating.
I chose sh.itjust.works but since then I’ve realized that it would be better to support instances that are local to me so I think I’ll move to an Australian instance. Supporting local instances might help with regional growth
its more that with more existing users its more likely any particular community will have already been pulled into that instance by someone else already.
I run my own instance so there’s nothing on my all feed outside of communities I already sub to because there are no others on my instance.
As a reminder, instances only get content from a community when someone on that instance is subscribed to it ( so to get it in in the first place they’d search !community@instance then subscribe to it).
Control is maybe the wrong term.
If you choose an instance that vaguely aligns with your interests then your local feed will be more interesting.
A lot of people are talking about federation and access to admins. But what’s missing is defederation policy.
Lemmy is a federated network of instances. If you’re on InstanceA and you make a community on InstanceA, and I’m on InstanceB, I can connect to your community on InstanceA. UNLESS, there’s a defederation- either InstanceA or InstanceB manually block the other. This is something the admins of the instance do.
Different instances have different policies on when (if ever) they defederate. Beehaw for example defederated a number of instances, but that’s due to the experience Beehaw is trying to create- very inclusive and affirming and whatnot. That’s their choice, but it meant defederating some of the more popular public instances (including lemmy.world).
//edit: Another thing relates to creating communities. Any communities you create will ‘live’ on your instance, and thus be under your instance’s rules. Some instancess are friendly to questionable subjects like piracy and NSFW material, others are not. So even if you don’t today intend to create any communities, it’s good to be on an instancewhose rules align with your own preferences.
Tbf, beehaw plans to refederate with lemmy.world once either the moderation tools for lemmy get better or lemmy.world makes it harder for trolls to just make a new lemmy.world account when banned from beehaw.
True, but that brings up another point which I just edited into my parent comment- instance rules. Any communities you create will be hosted on your home instance and thus subject to your home instance’s rules. So you should make sure those rules align with the sort of activity you’ll want to be doing.
This could always change at the whim of an admin as well. It’s good to have admin “teams” and even foundations, but a lot of the time there’s one person making those decisions.
Users and communities could be more portable. Admins should get to decide what is on their instance for sure, but right now there’s kind of a “lock in.” Which give admins disproportional control / responsibility. IMO.
Yes I agree—a big part of choosing an instance is who they are defederated with.
Depending on which instances are blocked you will see different content in ones or others. Which is why I choose instance based on the minimum number of blocked users based on the results of this script.
I basically did the same thing. Wrote a script to get a list of instances and how many instances they were federated with, blocked, and blocked by. Chose my instance based on those numbers after looking at a few of the top candidates.
You mean blocked instances right? AFAIK an instances “blocked users” is not published in aggregate. You’d have to comb through the modlog.
I don’t know there is a lemmy-stats-crawler utility that does it automatically and produces a json file. So all I do is parse that json file to get the numbers.
Ahh. I see. I took a look at the script. “Blocked Users,” is not reported by an instance, but rather It’s calculated by this script by looking at “Blocked Instances,” which is reported. How many active users each blocked instance has and then summing this together, the script shows “BU.” I was thinking it was an explicit list of users the instance blocked based on ban/block lists.
It’s a derivative, but still useful metric, I guess. BU could be high, but BI could be low and vice-versa.
Any instance, large or small, is only as good as the admin team running it. Ultimately, the larger instances have more content on their all feeds, are generally more stable, and are less likely to suddenly disappear. Smaller instances are generally faster, have more direct contact with their admins, and have more user control. Ultimately if you are having a good experience on lemmy.world you don’t have a strong impetus to switch, but I would maintain alt accounts with your subscriptions just in case. You can use a tool called lasim to port them from one account to another. Though I am biased, if you do decide to move to a smaller instance, I have a brand new one called lemmy.thesanewriter.com that I am currently the sole admin of that is accepting new users.
What is the stance on federation? I’d love to find a place that doesn’t federate with all the porn and politics instances.
My federation policy is currently fairly open, I’ve only defederated exploding-heads and burgitt. I’m open to making it more restrictive but would like to hear user opinions first.
You’ll probably experience more performance issues if you choose larger instances. On the other hand, it’s harder to know how reliable and stable smaller instances are.
Yeah, since I’ve joined lemmy.world has been down quite a few times so I can see the problem of too many people jumping onto one instance. Just figuring out how to find out if a smaller instance is both reliable and stable as you say… Not sure what metrics I can look at or if such metrics exist
In my case I looked at the welcome post of my instance (lemm.ee) when it was still small and could tell it was definitely a good instance to choose.
My instance was opened by the mod team of the Brazilian subreddit, they do a great job moderating the subreddit so I trusted them when they called us to move over here. Local experience is cool because is in Portuguese and Brazil centered, so I have a good contrast with All that is almost exclusively in English and European/US centric.
Lemmy.world seems to be frequently under attack
You’ve seen for yourself that it does have a significant effect. You may not want the largest instance because that paints a big target on you. You also need to pick an instance with admins you can trust, or at least reconcile yourself to jumping ship to another instance if they do the wrong thing.
I started on lemmy.ml about a year before the reddit exodus. It was fine, and I didn’t use it much because there wasn’t much activity. I started using Lemmy more heavily when everyone came over… but at the same time, performance at lemmy.ml became horrible. They also disabled community creation because “(they) have enough communities.” What does that even mean? I still haven’t created any communities, but I would like to be able to if I choose to.
I ended up jumping ship to another instance I’m happy with so far… but I almost went to vlemmy first, which no longer exists. That would have had an affect on my experience.
If I were evaluating an instance today, I would start by scrolling to the bottom of the page to see what version they’re on. Is it the latest? That means the admins are engaged at least enough to keep the software updated. If not, you should probably move on. Are they on a pre-release version? If so, are you comfortable with a little instability to have bleeding edge features and fixes? Then, I would just poke around a little to see how performance is on the instance before creating an account. Is it acceptable? Read the server sidebar. Are you OK with the rules? Last, I would find the support or “meta” community for the instance. See what kinds of discussions are happening there. Are the mods and admins active and are they philosophically aligned with you? Are problems being fixed? What are the big announcements? Does the way the server is being managed make sense to you?
I started on Lemmy.world, but found mander.xyz as a backup. Mander.xyz is smaller and has interesting science and nature content on Local without lots of negativity. It also federates with a lot of subs (including both beehaw and Lemmy.world) so I can still see everything in All.
I originally created a user on vlemmy.net. Then at some point that instance disappeared, causing me to lose the user, subscriptions and settings. So I created a user on lemmy.world. For whatever reason, it became very buggy - I don’t know if it’s the app (I’m using Jerboa) or the instance, but I got constantly logged out and loading posts didn’t work properly. Third time’s a charm (so far) as I created this user on lemm.ee.
The confidence of stability of different instances seems to be a huge detractor for me. I’m hoping to see lemm.ee run with decent stability going forward.
I’ve been on Lemm.ee since the start with no problems. Can you sandwich together those accounts across different instances somehow?
I went with .world because I’m a reddit refugee and it was the easiest to find when I knew nothing about Lemmy
I now have a lemmy.ca account for when world gets ddos’d
I think a good strategy is to start on Lemmy.World until you discover a solid list of communities you want to follow. Then switch to a smaller instance that aligns with your interests and bring all your subscriptions with you.
If you start on a small instance you’ll have to do a lot more work to discover communities, since they mostly won’t appear in your All feed. Plus, you’re doing that small instance a favor by bringing interesting communities to their All feed.
Sounds like good advice, stick with what I’m on for now (lemmy.world) and see what smaller instances appeal to me as I explore. I’ll probably end up doing this.
I’m also realizing from your post that the All feed is different from instance to instance? I thought it’s basically everything from all federated Lemmy instances.
It is, but the content that is federated varies from instance to instance. Instances only federate communities that a user on that instance is subscribed to, so the all feed is a combination of posts from every community that an instance member is subscribed to. For a large instance like lemmy.world that’s basically every community, but for medium instances there are various small communities they don’t have and for a small instance, the all feed will reflect the interests of the founding members.
Yeah the All feed shows you the communities that you and all your instance-mates follow, but not every community in existence.
All refers to everything that your instance knows about. Your instance only retrieves data for which users are actually subscribed.
All can be weird on small instances if the user subscriptions don’t have a nice distribution.
Thank you for asking this. I’m that student that had the same question but was afraid to ask.
Then I hope the answers are enlightening to us both! Takeaways so far are just choose a smaller instance and see if you can find one that specializes in your specific interests. But making sure it’s an instance that will be well and reliably run is the part I can’t figure out yet.
I’m gonna take this back a bit cause my understanding of the All tab has changed significantly from people’s responses. It seems choosing a larger instance is better for discovery, cause the All tab you see is just what people in your instance are subscribed to only, not all of the federated lemmy instances and communities. So I’m going to stick with a large instance for now (lemmy.world), then if I see a lot of content better fitting what I’m looking for on another instance, join that, or at least make an alt there.
Usually, it is correct, that the all feed would be smaller on a small instance, but “seeders”, like lcs or lemmony can make the feed in all tab much larger.
It does this by subscribing to a lot communites. Lcs does for specific communities and lemmony subscribes to everything. You can see an example of an all tab with many subscriptions(added via lemmony) at my instance
I think the easist way to check, if an instance uses one of these seeders is to check the number of subscriptions in the instance. Or just ask the admin for the instance.
How does being a student and afraid to ask relate?
It was a metaphore. I was describing myself as a student to afraid in class to ask.
I like the name.
They did come up with a good one over at sh.itjust.works
There are still a lot of syncing problems in Lemmy some outside posts show late or never show in other instances.I’m not worried about Lemmy.world despite all the attacks and issues they got. I think small instances are more chance to die than lemmy.world. If an instance die all the communities on it dies that’s not something I want to see especially if you are a mod on an community
More “portable” and secure identities would have been a good feature. The client could have handled most of the crypto required for signing and validating content. As it stands now, the instance Admin has complete control over your identity. Portable communities would follow that easily.
Most of the syncing issues are actually between the large instances or instances that having performance issues.
I started on lemmy.ml, as I code a lot. I got a lemmy.world account when I found a lot of communities there I wanted to join and a lemmy.studio account for music communities. That was a few min before I learned how to subscribe cross-instance. (I couldn’t find the communities) I could clean up teh accounts, but nah, couldn’t think of a reason why.
Now lemmy.world is my main instance with lemmy.ml as 1st backup and lemmy.studio as special interest. (and I found a Dutch instance)
