this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
212 points (99.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35696 readers
1260 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Would a smaller instance not be more likely to have weaker support, or more prone to shutting down and taking you with it?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

They might have smaller supports, but they are much less likely to be targets of ddos attacks and bots.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Mine is very prone to this because I'm running it myself and I'm a dumbass

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know, man. I think you could run the fediverse if you put your mind to it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

So far I've managed to

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'd rather rely on myself than someone else. I love my micro droplet instance. It feels nice knowing I am in control. [Somewhat].

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you have some links to Australian instances?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This is the one I’m thinking of switching to

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.