Lemmy World outages
Lemmy World outages
Hello there!
It has been a while since our last update, but it's about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.
So let's go over some of these misconceptions together.
"Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse".
While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network
The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don't like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.
And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members.
"Lemmy.World should close down registrations"
Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what's what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn't even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.
Which brings us to the third point:
"Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that's why the server is down all the time"
This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.
The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they'll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very 'expensive' sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.
So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That's one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.
"Why do they need another sysop who works for free"
Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.
We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.
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Ah no, sorry, while I sympathise with your technical issues, the rest of your post is disingenuous at best.
Lemmy.world being too big is bad for Lemmy as a product/software/"brand" etc - your downtime, being the instance most people link to, is a LOT of people's first impression and when it spends time being down, people associate THAT downtime with Lemmy, and not the hundreds of other instances that don't have downtime.
The issue isn't even about you being the biggest instance, its the absolute imbalance in both users and communities on one instance and you willingly allowing it continue. If you genuinely cared about Lemmy, you would close registrations now.
You have enough "technical" people to build your own instance from the source code with that change for the banner built in (and you could go ahead and submit the PR/Issue anyway), but you haven't - instead placing the blame on the developers. Hell, you only made the PR 5 hours ago after weeks of other admins asking you to close the instance.
You could even make the simple change to the sign up link instead lead to join-lemmy, but for whatever reason you want to continue to be the biggest instance and don't care about the wider lemmy ecosystem and the effect that it has.
Sorry, but I'm not going to listen to anybody who actively and purposely registers a .zip TLD.
It's probably a bad idea for me to reply, but this doesn't read well coming from an admin. For someone like me who doesn't know shit this reads like you know there are no issues with the backend of lemmy and this instance just selfishly grabbed up all the users and won't let them go anywhere.
If 10 people decided to do the same thing to 10 different instances would they all suffer the same downtime lemmy.world is? If so that does sound like a lemmy issue, not an instance issue.
I get not wanting any one instance to get too big, and that it goes against the core thoughts of federation, but shit happens. All that can be done is informing people as they onboard.
If I'm way off base let me know.
While I appreciate that, the issues caused by lemmy.world to many other admins can be monumental. If the instance goes down, it causes many people to wonder why federation has stopped working, despite the fact the home server is fine. All that content in one place is not only against the point of federation, its a risk to the existence of lemmy if the owner just decided to walk away tomorrow. While im sure he wont, and im sure many users would try to recreate or move communities elsewhere if he did, a large core percentage of lemmy wouldnt come back, and that is the risk.
As I said, I sympathise with their technical issues, hell this instance has had hours of downtime because of SQL queries, but claiming they aren't too big is not a valid response. Just because imbalanced instances happens elsewhere doesn't mean it isn't an issue here, especially because of the problems with the back end.
Their refusal to acknowledge the complete imbalance, or to do anything about it, is IMO an actual problem for lemmy.
Ps it's OK to disagree with me, but I'd rather people explain why than just downvote. Can't have a proper discussion with a downvote.
I downvoted your other post because while yes, in an ideal situation people migrating from Reddit would join local instances that fit their individual values the best, I don't agree that forcing people to join other instances than .world is the right or that it will make Lemmy better.
It doesn't matter if the reason is because they read about in a guide, it has most of the communities they liked, or even because it's the biggest instance currently, people's freedom of choice should be respected. How do you think complete newcomers would see Lemmy if even the most recommended instance turns them away? Probably that the whole thing is very exclusive.
The general sentiment around here seems to be that people like how the admins are handling things so far and that they feel inclined to be more active because there is enough users to generate discussions on smaller topics as well, so your claim that this instance is somehow damaging Lemmy's image seems a bit disingenuous to be honest.
I think that is always going to be a fundamental issue. There will always be instances that are too large in the "founding federalist" eyes. People are always going to flock to the place they see other people, or where their friends are. The cat is kinda out of the bag as far as that goes.
Blaming this instance seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Having a bunch of instances semi equally sharing all the users would be great, but I don't think it's ever going to happen. Humans like to be in groups, there will always be a "winner". I think the question is how to mitigate fallout when there's a failure.
Thanks for your comment. However that it sits in the high negative numbers (with 3 times the downvotes) shows that this instance is actually a problem. It is quite actively destroying principles of decentralized federated networks. Some very online super posters seem to participate in that.
Again it would be interesting to see who was it that downvoted your post.