Honest question, when I signed up for an account years ago I had no idea where or really how to sign up. Is the lemmy.world instance I’m registered on a dumpster fire? Seriously, do I need to change that sh*t?
Hi, it’s just the most popular instance, IIRC, and one of the aims of the fediverse is to prevent centralisation of the service so it’s healthy for the community if users are spread out across different instances. If everyone was on the same instance it is no different than a non-federated service and that can lead to power trips and the fate of communities in the hands of very few.
IDK if there is some internal .world drama going on or not but it’s worth exploring and seeing if there is another instance that might suit you better:
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Is LW a dumpster fire? No. Not at all. You’d notice it if it were.
But it is slow to upgrade, has some serious lag in federating with many instances, and represents a conceptual problem for decentralized social media by being a large, central entity in the network.
Like, if LW disappeared tomorrow, something like 25% of users and 40% of active communities would just blip out.
As far as federation speed, literally anything else is fine. LW currently takes about 5 days to federate to aussie.zone, because it hasn’t turned on multi-threading despite the feature having been available for months now, and without it, Lemmy has to send each post, comment, or upvote one at a time. So, the large geographical distance between Europe and Australia, combined with the large amount of content LW produces, means it literally cannot federate properly. Everyone else is smaller which means it’s a complete non-issue, and most others have admins who don’t wait many months before upgrading to address problems, so even if they did grow, they’d be able to address the issue.
I have no horse in this fight (I’m from fedia.io which runs on Mbin, a different platform entirely to Lemmy), but lemm.ee seems like a pretty good general-purpose instance to me. Although, switching to that is not really the most useful way to increase decentralization, as they’re currently the #2 Lemmy instance by active users. But every little bit helps.
I think the most important thing to understand about lemm.ee is their policy on defederation. Broadly, they try to avoid using defederation whenever possible, preferring to handle moderation with finer-precision tools. In theory, this might lead to you seeing more things you don’t like, because they don’t defederate some instances which others do, but it also means you interact with a greater number/variety of people.
If your goal is just to “see all of Lemmy”, lemm.ee seems like a pretty good starting place. Of course, you might have more specific desires or needs and prefer to join an instance that is more heavily defederated from instances with content you might object to, etc.
In terms of the Lemmy software staying up to date, you might want to check out FediDB. It can’t really tell you how quick after an update the various instances upgrade their server software, but you can see that a lot of instances haven’t upgraded to the current version yet. The stable right now is 0.19.10, released 3 weeks ago, so anybody who hasn’t updated yet you can probably assume takes … more than three weeks to update.
Nah, people tend to dislike too much centralization because it puts a lot of eggs in one basket both by number of users and by the volume of content. If .world went down, a lot of communities and their content would come to a halt. If those communities were more spread out then it would have less of an impact.
There is another trend that people have of hating the most popular thing because anything popular has lots of people involved and therefore will have a lot of shitty people. Whether there is a higher ratio or not isn’t that important, because when you come across 10 people from the same site that are shitty, it makes the association easy and it doesn’t matter if they are only 1% of the population. We tend to remember negative things more than positives after all, so anything popular will have plenty of people involved who will leave a bad impression. The same is true for fandoms, sports, and populations of countries.
Honest question, when I signed up for an account years ago I had no idea where or really how to sign up. Is the lemmy.world instance I’m registered on a dumpster fire? Seriously, do I need to change that sh*t?
Hi, it’s just the most popular instance, IIRC, and one of the aims of the fediverse is to prevent centralisation of the service so it’s healthy for the community if users are spread out across different instances. If everyone was on the same instance it is no different than a non-federated service and that can lead to power trips and the fate of communities in the hands of very few.
IDK if there is some internal .world drama going on or not but it’s worth exploring and seeing if there is another instance that might suit you better: https://join-lemmy.org/instances
Thanks so much for the useful information. Definitely be exploring links
Is LW a dumpster fire? No. Not at all. You’d notice it if it were.
But it is slow to upgrade, has some serious lag in federating with many instances, and represents a conceptual problem for decentralized social media by being a large, central entity in the network.
Like, if LW disappeared tomorrow, something like 25% of users and 40% of active communities would just blip out.
What’s an alternative that strikes a good balance between userbase, performance, federation speed, etc.?
My LW experience has been mostly fantastic.
As far as federation speed, literally anything else is fine. LW currently takes about 5 days to federate to aussie.zone, because it hasn’t turned on multi-threading despite the feature having been available for months now, and without it, Lemmy has to send each post, comment, or upvote one at a time. So, the large geographical distance between Europe and Australia, combined with the large amount of content LW produces, means it literally cannot federate properly. Everyone else is smaller which means it’s a complete non-issue, and most others have admins who don’t wait many months before upgrading to address problems, so even if they did grow, they’d be able to address the issue.
I have no horse in this fight (I’m from fedia.io which runs on Mbin, a different platform entirely to Lemmy), but lemm.ee seems like a pretty good general-purpose instance to me. Although, switching to that is not really the most useful way to increase decentralization, as they’re currently the #2 Lemmy instance by active users. But every little bit helps.
I think the most important thing to understand about lemm.ee is their policy on defederation. Broadly, they try to avoid using defederation whenever possible, preferring to handle moderation with finer-precision tools. In theory, this might lead to you seeing more things you don’t like, because they don’t defederate some instances which others do, but it also means you interact with a greater number/variety of people.
If your goal is just to “see all of Lemmy”, lemm.ee seems like a pretty good starting place. Of course, you might have more specific desires or needs and prefer to join an instance that is more heavily defederated from instances with content you might object to, etc.
In terms of the Lemmy software staying up to date, you might want to check out FediDB. It can’t really tell you how quick after an update the various instances upgrade their server software, but you can see that a lot of instances haven’t upgraded to the current version yet. The stable right now is 0.19.10, released 3 weeks ago, so anybody who hasn’t updated yet you can probably assume takes … more than three weeks to update.
You could try out Sopuli.xyz! They tend to stay on top of updates.
Kbin was small but I definitely noticed when it went down forever.
I second this question
Nah, people tend to dislike too much centralization because it puts a lot of eggs in one basket both by number of users and by the volume of content. If .world went down, a lot of communities and their content would come to a halt. If those communities were more spread out then it would have less of an impact.
There is another trend that people have of hating the most popular thing because anything popular has lots of people involved and therefore will have a lot of shitty people. Whether there is a higher ratio or not isn’t that important, because when you come across 10 people from the same site that are shitty, it makes the association easy and it doesn’t matter if they are only 1% of the population. We tend to remember negative things more than positives after all, so anything popular will have plenty of people involved who will leave a bad impression. The same is true for fandoms, sports, and populations of countries.
LW is actually pretty awesome. It’s the most vanilla of the servers.
The only real issue is that is so big that if they ever go down for any reason, a majority of the communities do too. So it’s nice to spread around.
Thank you again admins! You people are awesome!
There’s nothing wrong with world, except for it being always overloaded by too many users.
I don’t like how ban-happy they got over Luigi
Also they seem too big, to have too heavy control by its admins
You don’t need to move if you don’t want to. There is some problems with it, so I recommend newcomers to avoid it.
Mainly technical issues from its size.