2y ago

YSK: If you want faster and less buggy User experience, move to a smaller instance that is hosted close to you.

I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.

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All fine and dandy, but don't just pick a random one close to you. Don't forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
- Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
  What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don't even require an email address to sign up.
  
  Like if you are ginger or not
  
  At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren't ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn't say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
  My main concern would be instance longevity.
  
  The biggest issue is that you're giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?
- Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don't mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.

Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community

Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
- Close to you helps in general, it's not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
  
  Agreed that close helps in general but 200-300ms isn't really that noticeable unless it's something where latency is important. I'm also surprised that some of the larger instances aren't using Cloudflare for caching. If things like images etc... are cached all over the world then I doubt anyone would notice any speed issues.
- Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as "preferably"

- Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.

Thank you for this. Just wish there was a way to migrate account to still keep posts/comments/subs/etc but oh wrll. Faster now at least
- There are feature requests on the gethub for Lemmy to add the ability to move users and communities between instances. It comes up often enough it's just a question of how to implement it and when.
- What do you mean? Why would you need to migrate your account?
  
  In order to switch instances hosted on a different server, but keep your account history such as comments, votes, posts, saved posts, etc.
  Only way to switch instances right now is to make a new account from scratch on that instance.

Can I migrate my account to a new instance? Or will i have user logins all over the fediverse?
- For right now, I believe there is no way to move a user account so you will need to create a new one. Can be the same name, tho!
  I believe there is a feature in the works to be able to move accounts between instances but I am unsure of where in the development pipeline it is.
  
  The best way Ive found is to copy the html of your community list and paste it into an online tool that pulls the hyperlinks out of it, then make an excel spreadsheet to change the URL of the community to the https format so it's easier to search. The instances also aren't 100% compatible. Like I can subscribe to kbin and Fedia on my larger instance account but not on my self hosted one.
  
  Yeah, that will be nice if you can migrate your name to other instances... Cheers!

So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)

I'm hosting a tiny instance for myself a few friends that serves as a reliable gateway to communities and content from bigger instances. Sign up approvals are limited, but I'm open to a few public users.
Currently email verification is enabled, but feel free to use a burner. This will be disabled in favor of captchas when 0.18.1 drops.
- Isn't 18.1 already live?
  
  It's in release candidate (rc.9) so fairly mature but not technically released.

How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
- You can click the "use map" button on this site: https://fediverse.observer/. But if you can't find a instance that you like that is close don't worry. Because server closeness doesn't matter nearly as much as servers being overloaded.
  
  From the map, there are 21 fediverse servers in Taiwan but none of them are Lemmy. There are even fewer in China (only 4 based on this map if I select "All" in the option).
  AFAIK there aren't any Chinese language content about Lemmy yet.
  The center of Fediverse of Asia seems to be Singapore and Tokyo.
  Also how can I know which servers are federated\defederated to most of the Lemmy instances?
  
  Holy crap there are at least 12 different servers within 50 miles of me. Some have a few thousand subscribers lol.
  Gotta love Houston. Thanks for linking that!
  
  Can you create Lemmy accounts on Mastodon servers?

For people still looking for an instance close to their location: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map

Hello there, and welcome to our community! I hope you like it in here.
Could you please include some body text as to why should people know this, and how would that help them? It’s our second rule. Thank you :)

Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat
- In what way is it more GDPR ready than other instances? I assume it uses the same server software?
  
  By having an actual policy. That lists the usage of data, 3rd parties and the responsibilities of the instance owner.

I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.
https://thelemmy.club
You'll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I'll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)

move to a smaller instance that is hosted close to you.
How do I know the distance from an instance to me?
- Check this out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
- Can resolve the ip of the instance, then use an ip locator to get a rough distance

added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too
Can you elaborate?
- Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can't moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.
  They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can't find it at the moment.
  
  https://beehaw.org/post/567170

Won't you see limited posts?
- Not if they're federated to the larger instances, which they are by default. I think maybe you need to search an instance to start if no one from your instance has searched for the other instance yet, but idk, don't quote me on that

Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.

Definetly good advice! :) Thanks you for recommending discuss.tchncs.de

What's a good one if you're in Toronto?

I'm having trouble understanding how this works. If i create a community on a different instance, why can't i find it here, even when i have the switch set to all? Do they only sync on certain times of the day? Also when i delete a community (that i created by accident) why does it not disappear?
- Federation happens gradually and changes are usually not visible everywhere at the same time. Using a fully qualified name (or an URL like https://lemmy.world/c/community@instance) you should be able to access your new community though.

this post made me move instances and i am glad that i did, thanks!

I signed on to lemmy.world in June as that seemed like The Place, but now I'm thinking of switching to a lesser populated instance. I still haven't found an instance that I like enough to switch to though. Right now, even with the performance issues, lemmy.world still feels like the most suitable instance for me.

Yes, I just made the switch to a closer instance yesterday. So much faster. I was on lemmy.world for the past few weeks but then I realized the server is hosted in Europe and I was getting 144ms ping from US east coast. This new instance I'm on, I'm getting 22ms ping.
You can test latency yourself from cmd by typing "ping lemmy.world" for example

Is moving instances a thing or would you need to sign up from scratch?
- There's a script already in development by an enthusiast https://sh.itjust.works/post/693061
- Currently Lemmy doesn't support account migrating but it is technically possible afaik. It might get added in future but currently you have to sing up from sracth. Hovewer I would say having a Lemmy.world account in addition is probably a good call.
- AFAIK you need to sign up from scratch. But I'm pretty sure Lemmy devs will work on that. It's already a thing on Mastodon.

Could an instance be hosted inside an app? In a container locally on your own machine? Maybe the two could be synced? One instance across all your devices synced?
That would be the safest?
- As I understand it, you can host your own instance off a personal server, and use that as your "home" instance.

You still need an extra acc onthebig ones if you want to usethe apps though. Not all instances are supported.
- Which app have you been struggling with? Both Jerboa and Connect worked fine with different servers for me, I'm guessing others are fine too
- ? On all Lemmy apps I've used, you can just type the URL for the Lemmy instance your account is on, even if it's not on the "default" list.

84 comments