this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2023
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I imagine there's excitement for the increase of activity but worries about the potential toxic side of Reddit coming along too.

I'd especially be interested in the Lemmy devs' opinions.

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

I’m a lemmygrad user, so it’s been a little annoying dealing with people who wander in to troll but it’s not too bad

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

I'm all about it! Great to see a platform take off when it's centered around being ad free and open sourced.

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

Pretty happy.

The place and platform is capable of growth and diversity ... on which, many should consider starting their own instances just to spread the load and allow people to find their moderation homes.

I've been wanting the fediverse to be more topic/group/community based than a twitter clone since I got here, so it makes sense to see some interest in these "Threadiverse" style platforms.

There'll be growing pains, and the current admins and devs are probably going through some pain now. Sorry! I just hope enough community leaders, former sub-reddit mods and future admins will see the value in distributing social media and help pick up the slack.

More broadly, for those who don't know, IMO, the fediverse has been suffering from an essentially oppressive dominance by Mastodon. Everyone thinks the fediverse is just Mastodon. Though that's completely untrue, as there are a number of alternative platforms, some of which are rather novel and interesting, it is numerically very true with Mastodon comprising >80% of fediverse users.

Generally, this amount of dominance is almost certainly bad for the future health of the fediverse and the values it seeks to promote (ie, interconnected platform and community diversity). Mastodon, at the moment, is creeping towards being just another centralised platform ... essentially an OSS non-profit Twitter in its own right, which isn't a bad thing at all, but not what the fediverse is about.

Enter the Threadiverse! Lemmy, /kbin (and even calckey a little with what will hopefully become its federated channels), and others. Not just platform diversity, but medium or format diversity.

At this moment, IMO, it is very valuable to the fediverse at large, that lemmy, /kbin etc grow and do well.

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

It's fricking amazing. There is regular conversation and places that have been dead for years are reviving themselves.

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

Well:

  • I'm annoyed at calling people who dislike an app and choose another website "refugees"
  • I'm happy that we're going to have more activity
  • I hope more instances will be built and maintained, because I don't think the large number of new members can be moderated effectively if they keep flocking to the same handful of instances
  • When in doubt, I hope moderators will be too strict rather than not enough, especially in the beginning to make sure the behavioural expectations are very clear
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Sensitivity aside, "explat" is a more clever name.

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

That's a good point, thanks for adding some nuance :)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

just to emphasize your point there about calling people refugees. I always lurked reddit to the point of using libreddit only lately, and never felt the drive to contribute

with reddit's shenanigans, I found out about this place in one of the posts asking for alternatives and it's a whole different atmosphere and I feel more comfortable not lurking anymore

all this to say that I am here because of reddit's actions, but I'm not a refugee

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

Honestly, while most people here have been alright, toxic newcomers have been a problem and I consider this place ill-prepared to handle them in a bigger wave than this one.

There has already been an observable culture shift, and some nasty screaming when some newcomers used to being a majority are challenged in their views and shocked to find a nontrivial pushback. And I feel that lemmy.ml will undergo a similar event to /r/antiwork if there isn't staff action taken , where the place loses all its values and just becomes a sanewashed recuperated place that feels cheated when its founders keep saying what they said from the start. People largely just don't read rules or sidebars, it seems, and realize lemmy.ml explicitly says it isn't a general unthemed instance for everyone. It's broad, but not 'reddit' broad, nor (pretending to be) politically neutral. Relevant source

Edit: I realize this may come off as "why aren't other people doing more things!". I realize the staff/devs are overloaded, I'm not blaming them to telling them to drop things. But I regret how few moderating/admin staff were recruited, and we're seeing how many communities were made 4 years ago and have no active moderation, nor culture to avoid this becoming 'reddit but here'.

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

I don't know how to interpret "everyone should feel welcome here" other than it is for everyone. As far as culture shift, it really is impossible to maintain the more "fringe" leftist culture with an increase in users, marxist-leninist simply do not exist in large enough numbers. I don't really see why lemmy.ml shifting its majority political leaning would be something negative to you, since the only thing that would happen would be more discussion in the comments, and if discussion isn't something desirable, places like lemmygrad do exist

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

I'm not even talking about the M-Ls, I mean even as broad as anti-capitalism and tech/FOSS. There was a meta discussion a while back I started seeking clarification on what "leftist" in the lemmy.ml blurb means, suggesting something less vague. Because to the devs, it evidently doesn't mean 'progressive capitalists'.

This isn't just some preference, because these factors are precisely why Lemmy won't become another reddit disaster. And no, they're not niche groups. Even on reddit, these communities are substantial!

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

I'm actually quite pleased at the new influx of users! There's finally a good amount of activity and real discussion going on here, instead of just posts with links to articles with zero comments and no real OC.

Aside from that, I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn't be too much of a toxicity problem. Honestly, my own biggest fear is just that a lot of the new users here lose interest and move on, returning the platform to its earlier days.

For now, I just hope that the servers don't go down in flames when the 12th comes around. I can't wait to see how this platform will look further down the road though!

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

I literally just signed up and this is the first comment I've read. I feared we might be seen as outsiders so thanks. I've been banned from Reddit for quite some time but lurked on RIF. Hopefully Lemmy can scale in time.

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

I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.

My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?

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

Maybe not for the initial deluge, but with sustained growth the number of mods will grow too

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe, maybe not, but the instances have the option of closing registrations for a bit if they get overwhelmed and need to regroup. This is why it's nice to see lots of other instances popping up across the fediverse

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

Maybe I'm missing something but how will that help the moderation, since users can visit/comment from any instance?

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

I'm in Lemmy for, like, two years? Mostly lurking. I've been looking for alternatives for longer than that though.

I feel like the monsoon is mostly welcome. Content quality may decrease a bit, but the quantity will make up for it. And quantity is what has been missing IMO.

In special I'm hoping for specialised instances about some subjects that I enjoy. I like the Lemmy instance but stuff like anime and conlanging "feels" off-topic here.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Been here patiently waiting for quite a while... this is what i've been waiting for, for reddit to finally fuckup bad enough that people move over.

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

If reddit deletes NSFW content, we can expect a third exodus of users

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

Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.

If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I hope the reddit echo box 'our way or the highway', 'everything is a pun' mentality doesn't transfer over as well

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Aww, but Reddit pun threads are fun.

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

Agreed, I hope there is room for pun threads here too.

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

To each his own I guess. To me it's too much of the same regurgitated over and over again like a meme that stopped being funny years ago

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

They're fine when appropriate. It's nauseating how they're inserted everywhere.

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

Yeah, when a simple bots can post most of the replies. E.g. if post.contains("r/theydidthemath") { post.reply("/r/theydidthemonstermath"); } then it's gone too far. There are some good, creative ones, like The Old Reddit Switch-a-roo, but they're too few and far between.

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

Once you've seen the Anne Frankly one more than a few times, you'll have had enough

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

When someone shares a personal story about his wife's struggle with cancer and the top reply is "I also choose this guy's dead wife"

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I fired up my own personal test instance so I can experiment with figuring out ways to reduce bottlenecks on the sysadmin/devops side - used to run the various PHP forums back in the day, so hoping to pass on some knowledge eventually.

I figure the toxic side(s) will gravitate towards instances that will tolerate their behaviour which is easier to deal with. Mods will be busy for a little bit though, and I wouldn't be surprised if registrations closed for a bit on some of the bigger instances so they can catch up if they don't just fall flat over on the heavy days. But, lots of smart folks trying to prep for this.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any idea what hardware specs you need to run an instance? Like for 100 users, 1.000, 10k etc?

Or the hardware lemmy.ml runs on and the userbase?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they're using though in their financial statements if you're curious, but there's of operational optimization being tried out to see what'll help.

The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn't too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.

I'm on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I'm subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I'm not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm looking forward to the increase in traffic tbh. I have setup a pretty beefy instance with a ton of monitoring on it so that hopefully after the wave I can create a nice write up on what it would take to scale lemmy in the future. I'll keep everyone updated with the results!

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

Yeah, this is a golden moment for those of us who like to learn from sudden heavy load on server software! There are not very many teachable moments like this out there, so I'm trying to soak everything up for work experience

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have an i-5 6core dell sitting so why shouldn't I spin up a node?

I'm mostly worried about maintenance and it breaking down one day, how do you deal with that in a good way?

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

Regular backups should do the job. It's all run in docker instances with mapped volumes, so you can just backup those contents regularly and roll-back worst case if things completely pooped out. Otherwise maintenance isn't really much worse than a normal webserver - great for learning Linux CLI if you're not already familiar.

No reason you shouldn't spin up a node though! The more the better - lets load spread out.