Why do the instances keep going down? It makes me think that this is not a reliable social network, but the alternatives are not as good.

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[–] 15 points 3 years ago (3 children)

You're thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it's really you. Would be cool. 😎

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I follow nine other instances.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn't dependent on one instance.

    Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.

    It's just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It's going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.

    Also...there's a non-zero chance it's getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Distributed denial of service.

    That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Yep, this is key. If you’re getting a bunch of malicious traffic from one source, that’s easily fixed. Just drop the traffic.

    But when that traffic is coming from hundreds or thousands of sources, that becomes much harder to address. Can you just drop traffic from those sources? Sure! But then you also risk dropping legitimate traffic.

    There are also services that can automate the detection and prevention of DDOS attacks such as CloudFlare and Akamai, but these can get expensive very quickly, so it can significantly increase the cost to running the instance in question.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I honestly forgot what the first D was at that moment lol. While I agree it technically can be done pretty badly without distributed attacks. I read in the past couple of years of an approach attackers used was to make an application DOS itself from a single request. I think it required a vulnerability in the application in this instance though.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I read that it was a DDOS but I wonder what the motivation for doing that is? It isn't like you can extort any money out of lemmy.

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  • Some people are just spiteful shitheads. Also, there's been a bit of a wave of DDOS attacks against US-registered sites lately- Archive of Our Own, a fanfiction website, got DDOSed a few weeks back. Seems like they're going after any site that doesn't have good DDOS protection and is based in the US.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Lemmy is still alpha software, thrust into the limelight by the fall of Reddit. It is still in its infancy. Reddit has had over 18 years to get it right. So it will take some time.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The Lemmy.world server runs on a 16mhz 386dx and has 16mb of ram. It just does that sometimes.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Lemmy.world is super big AND being attacked constantly. Smaller instances don't have these issues and they are stable and fast. You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.

    I'm on lemmy.today and it's fast and stable. Come join us and you will see.

    Basically use the fediverse the way it was meant to be used.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    You can still subscribe to everything from Lemmy.world and your instance will remain up even when Lemmy.world is down.

    I had no idea, just tried and you are right. Do you know if everything works the same, like moderation?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago*

    Yeah it's all federated. If you get banned from a community on Lemmy.world, you will not be able to access it from Lemmy.today for example (with your lemmy.today user account).

    This is the really super cool part about the fediverse. People don't realize.. This is where the magic is.

    If Lemmy.world is down, you still access posts and threads and make posts etc from lemmy.today.. And it all syncs when Lemmy.world is up again.

    Another mind blowing moment is when you realize you can read and post on Lemmy from Mastadon.... So you can combine interacting with Mastadon and Lemmy in the same conversion.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Your instance only has two communities and they're both about Lemmy. Seems a bit boring to me. Sorry.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    I guess you need to do some more research on how Lemmy works.

    You can follow any community from any instance. For now you could create an account at some lesser populated instances, I had one on lemmy.ml, made another account on monyet.cc. It's a minor inconvenience that you have to subscribe to communities but other than that my experience with lemmy has been very good.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Local communities are totally irrelevant when deciding which instance should host your account.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    Yeah it's just getting started, and you can start new communities if you like. But no point starting ones that already exists on other instances.

    The amount of local communities doesn't matter much, Im subscribed to like 100 remote communities anyway. :)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Reread their last sentence.

    What instance you use as your home instance is irrelevant unless it has been defederated from an unusual amount of instances. You likely don't want to try and use lemmygrad as your home lol.

    Otherwise, home instance is only going to determine your local feed. Which is pretty much the least used feed anywhere other than maybe beehaw. Discovery via all combined with searches lets you populate your subscribed feed, so those are the ones that you'll use most.

    Lemmy is federated by design. If you try and treat instances like some kind of dedicated site the way reddit was, you might as well not use it at all because you'll be missing out on the benefits federation brings to the format.

    Are you old enough to remember geocities? It had these circles where individual sites within geocities would link to each other. You would have your own site, but be linked to maybe hundreds of others. That's closer to what lemmy is than the kind of reddit experience you're probably used to.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (15 children)

    I've started a 2nd account on another instance just for situations like that.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    How do you keep communities aligned across the accounts?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I made a tool that can help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim

    It allows you to synchronize subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings between accounts.

    (though FYI different versions only gracefully handle a specific API version at a time so there's some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3 - see my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2094948 )

    EDIT: Second link isn't working - must be a Lemmy bug. But you can see it as a recent post on my profile.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    specific API version at a time so there’s some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3

    What API-breaking changes did you find?

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    [–] 2 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)

    Its on its infancy and remember this is not run by a big corporation its run by volunteers. If you dont like feel free to go back to reddit.

    Edit: Hey guys so yeah this comment was too harsh against newcomers to the platform and I would like to apologize.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    While you are correct, your tone is quite dismissive and unwelcoming. If it's to be a replacement, it's reliability is relevant. On most of the update posts ive seen, users are generally appreciative of the work done.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    I’m talking out of my ass, but software devs rarely think about scalability, backup, and high availability.

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    [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's definitely bad if you can't use a service you'd like to use but one has to remember that this isn't run by someone with millions of dollars at their fingertips. And the reason for that is simple: This service doesn't exploit it's users.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Best bet is probably to create an account on Lemmy and another on Kbin. Not only is it simply not likely for two instances to go down, but they're also different platforms, so further decreases the likelihood. And you can see all the same content.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)
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