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 @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.

  • SkidFace@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1451·
    2 years ago

    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!

    • impulse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      211·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • bandario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        2 years ago

        undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

        People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don’t worry, you’ll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.

        Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.

    • Maiznieks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3139·
      2 years ago

      Found one russian troll already. Oh well…

      Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.

      • BOMBS@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        2 years ago

        you can easily block any user by click on the 🚫 sign under their comment, and never have to deal with their bs again

        • thorle@feddit.deEnglish
          6·
          2 years ago

          wow, that’s actually a really nice feature. I wonder how it works though, i guess their text just will be blacked out for me, or will the post and all answers to it be completely vanish?

          • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            2 years ago

            They’re only invisible to you, it’s kind of like muting on Twitter more than blocking, as far as I understood. (I haven’t felt the need to do it yet!)

      • Drew Got No Clue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        2 years ago

        Lesson learned today: never take anything for granted—if there’s a chance to be massively misunderstood, it will eventually happen lol

        • bobaduk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          202·
          2 years ago

          I think they meant they’ve seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.

          I … Have to assume so, anyway

        • bobaduk@lemmy.worldEnglish
          15·
          2 years ago

          I think they meant they’ve seen one Russian troll on Lemmy already, not that skidface is a Russian troll.

          I … Have to assume so, anyway

  • notsorryforpartying@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    2 years ago

    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

    • prototypeByDesign@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • stankmut@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Sens@feddit.ukEnglish
          21·
          2 years 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.

  • Cool Beance@lemmy.worldEnglish
    37·
    2 years ago

    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/memes@lemmy.ml

    • 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

    • zinklog@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      This seems like a much better explanation for Lemmy compared to the email analogy everyone writes for non-tech savvy people.

      • andrew@radiation.partyEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        This absolutely is not true today, they create links that are absolute and refer to the host of the community in question.

          • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            for a while it will result in a lot of seemingly dead links as small communities will appear as 404s until the remote instance has synced.

            Or at least that’s what i’m seeing occasionally when I try to copy/paste the communites onto my instances /c/ URL.

        • ioNabio@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          right I was just testing it and it auto fills with absolute path using “!”. Using “@” I could only link local communities

    • slopecarver@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      Is there a way to view C/Memes in all instances at once in aggregate? I don’t want to miss out on what other instances are doing.

        • slopecarver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          I’m new here so I might not be asking the right question. As I understand it there are many subforums one on each instance with the same exact name. Are they all shown at once while browsing? Can they be?

          I wasn’t talking about multiforums but that’s good to know too.

          • foggenbooty@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 years ago

            There can be multiple communities with the same name, that doesn’t mean there are. Like how yourname@gmail.com and yourname@hotmail.com are the same “name” but a different domain.

            So say for example you and your friend start up your own Lemmy instance and decide to make your own community called “Funny” where you can post jokes, without bothering to check if there was already a more popular “Funny” in someone else’s instance. There’s nothing stopping you and now there will be two communities called Funny, but one would be Funny@lemmy.world and yours would be Funny@whateveryoupicked.com

            If your “Funny” gets to be really popular too, then other people might choose to subscribe to both Funny communities, and then posts from both would be in their feed. However they are distinctly seperate and you will continue to own and run yours and lemmy.world would own theirs.

            Does that make sense? I know it’s a weird concept when you’re used to unique names in Reddit, but it’s not all that different from r/news and r/worldnews covering similar content but controlled by different people.

  • naughty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    2 years ago

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

  • delaghetto@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • fubo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      2 years 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.

    • Crackhappy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years 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).

  • IowaMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    18·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • manitcor@lemmy.intai.techEnglish
    17·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • Lermatroid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Targox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      I’ll give it a shot! Edit: love the fact that click to collapse is back. No search bar, account info and the occasional crash but the feed looks great! Looking forward to future updates

    • solidsnake911@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 years ago

      iOS only? Or also Android? Btw, you receive notifications on Jerboa? What do you use for Lemmy on Android?

    • solidsnake911@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      Maybe Reddit signed a little death sentence with APIpocalypse. Elon did same shit and Twitter actions in stock market dropped a lot! (even more than with adquisition). Reddit wants go to stock market soon.

      Bad move u/spez and Reddit staff!

  • dystop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    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?

    • Black616Angel@feddit.deEnglish
      18·
      2 years 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.

    • Barbarian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      13·
      2 years ago

      Reddit is not a “simpler setup”. Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They’re just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.

    • worldofbirths@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      2 years ago

      Was thinking the same thing, is a lemmy instance supposed to be literally a single server instance?

  • novettam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    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!

  • zikk_transport2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    2 years ago

    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.

      • tetha@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        Feel free to ping me as well if something sets up. I currently don’t have the time or personal grit to run a full instance on my own, but I know how to run linux, postgres, mysql, networks and other things. Ansible/Chef mostly as well, some puppet, some salt. Been doing this for 10 years or so on different stacks.

        I’d be happy to be part of some “Lemmy-OPs-Support” group, wherever it may be to chime in with experience.

      • 00Lemming@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        I think this is a great idea as well. I don’t have quite the experience set of @ziiki_transport2 (Primary PSE) but am sure I could pitch in, in some way. Would be a good venue for brainstorming ideas as well(not that you seem to need it ;))

    • OneShoeBoy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Wouldn’t something like a Matrix server be more in line with the ‘philosophy’ of the fediverse?