this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

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So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @[email protected] for assisting with that.

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 136 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

this is very Reddit-y of you

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I will add, joking aside, that Ruud is doing a bloody good job (sorry, I don't know yet how to tag a user).

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When a volunteer can run a server better then a big tech company

unsurprising pikachu face

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair the volunteer isn't trying to squeeze value out of the users to inflate his IPO.

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[–] [email protected] 150 points 1 year ago (13 children)

Like many others, I came from Reddit and was initially hesitant to try it out, but I love this place so much! It really feels like the "worse" parts of Reddit have been skimmed off, and that definitely shows with how nice people seem here! Thank you so much!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

how nice people seem here

yes! I love the culture of this place so far

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.

Which is a very good thing, because that's what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it's relying on donations for funding, I believe?

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (5 children)

So, I just want to make sure I understand this as I am a new user from reddit. Instances are server based and cost money. Instances are Lemmy.World, Beebaw, Lemmy.Film, etc etc. These are all seperate hosted instances. Correct?

And donations would help pay for the server, ie lemmy.world?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago

I'm a newbie from Reddit too, but your understanding matches mine.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, lemmy.world, lemmy.film, beebaw and etc are other instances of Lemmy and users from other instances can interact with other instances.

And yes donations help the server afloat.

Pretty cool stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago

That is correct. I've signed up for monthly donations to help cover costs (as well as added tip to help the admins themselves).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

"Lemmy instances" are analogous to "email servers": your account is hosted on one of them, but you can communicate with people on other ones, because the servers know how to talk to each other.

Expanding the capacity of the Lemmy service will involve both (1) more instances, and (2) more resources for existing instances.

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[–] [email protected] 76 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate... My friend gave me a great explanation:

  • Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

  • “Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

  • When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

  • If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community

  • When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from

  • Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately

  • c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it's c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/[email protected]

  • Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.

Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit

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[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure how its being done as far as the technical aspects but Ruud has done a great job as admin upgrading the servers to keep up and anticipating the flow of new users.

The same admin also has experience with a mastadon.world server that experienced lots of growth from Twitter users leaving over musk moves. So essentially we have a good admin as far as I can tell and it's not his first rodeo. Part of the reason I chose this server

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm less concerned with the technical aspects and more curious about the long term.

Federated instances, such as lemmy.world, are operated by individuals; What happens if they decide to stop doing so without handing the server/data off to someone else? Do all of our accounts created here disappear? What do other users see if they click through my profile from a post on a different federated server? What happens to all of the content created on the server in question?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It would be gone.

The federated design has got people already thinking about it though. It's inevitable that some instances will just close without notice. So people are trying to figure out the best way to handle it, from archiving/mirroring to creating an export account feature.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

It’s very early days and the projects will be developed quite extensively I imagine, this is a chance for some people like myself to contribute to new features and make a real impact on its future.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (3 children)

12k ??? That's crazy! It was only 500 when I joined 6 days ago, wow!

No worries for the downtime, when it's needed, it's needed :)

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I’m glad to hear about the new users (I myself am one.) and the server upgrades!

I think lemmy.world suits me better than Beehaw. (great folks over there, no shade)

I like that lemmy.world let’s communities be openly created by users, as well as the inclusion of downvoting which I personally prefer.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I hope not all people will go back to reddit as soon as the communities go public again.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The two day blackout was what finally got me to actually look into the fediverse, figure out servers and whatnot, and make an account to try it out. I've been meaning to look into it for a while, but the blackout was the push I needed. I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm far more interested in exploring this exciting new space then I am going back to the garbage filled Reddit, even if they miraculously back down on the API changes .

My reddit account was over 10 years old. This is my first comment on Lemmy/Fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Just curious, what sort of hardware is lemmy.world using/moving to? Wondering if there's a good way to predict load based on number of users.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

Lemmy.world is fantastic, thanks for your efforts. It fit perfectly with all the criteria I had when choosing where to host my account.

That being said, I wish Lemmy.ml, the "main" Lemmy instance, more often registered communities created here. At the moment, most people just search for communities there and many of our own don't show up because no user from that instance interacted with our new and growing communities just yet - not only does this create a fragmentation issue, but given the massive load spike, Lemmy.ml is actually running a bit slow whereas Lemmy.world is handling posts better, making interaction easier specially when migrating users from Reddit or other places. For instance, my GameBoy community is ready, with users, and I'm about to post some good content - but as far as someone from Lemmy.ml is concerned, no such community exists.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Awesome to see so much growth. I just joined yesterday and I guess I'm not alone!

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What's the operating cost? Thank you, for running this server! :)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The cheapest configuration for that server on Hetzner is about €150 per month.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I really appreciate what you're doing, but I'm worried how this instance will continue scaling. What happens when it gets to 1 million users? 10 million? We can scale vertically only somewhat, but horizontal scaling seems to be limited to "just join a new instance 4head" and that just...doesn't have a good experience.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

King Ruud is good to us

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I'm not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn't seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Look at the pricing!

Hetzner wants 150€ for this server. 3TB disk is 50€ extra. So 200€ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6¢ per user and month. This should be very manageable.

Also it doesn't mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.

They are already raising 600€ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.

But you are right with something else:
Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Went ahead and subbed on patreon. Hope that lemmy survives the growing pains and can develop some of the community that reddit had!

Also if there are any fellow former apollo users would def recommend checking out Mlem, its in testflight right now but seems to be working towards the experience that apollo gave on reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

do you plan to publish any of your scaling data? Some others might consider helping by running large instances and your learnings would be incredibly helpful.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, when I get around to it I can create a post about it. And of course, feel free to ask.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (11 children)

Performance is looking awesome, lemmy.world is responding very fast to community subscription requests and search is also very fast. My experience when using other instances was that search didn't work at all, hindering community discovery.

Thanks!

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Umm I joined at 2k uses now there are over 15k. Damn this is exploding.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Would be awesome if you create some group chat (e.g. Discord?) and add sysadmins/devops to it. Would be more than happy to assist, especially if you have questions or need opinions.

I've been working as sre/sysadmin/devops for the past ~5 years and ~9 years of (Arch) Linux user. More than 1K Arch Wiki edits over that period of time.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

All hail ruud ~~/u/ruud~~ (does that work?) Oh I have to make an actual link?

Oh and fuck spez.

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