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Welcome Lemmy.world

167 points| dragontamer | 2 years ago |blog.mastodon.world | reply

77 comments

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[+] eigenspace|2 years ago|reply
I wish Lemmy's default design was more of a copy of old.reddit.com. For me, that design was better than both HackerNews' design and way better than the current default look of Lemmy instances.
[+] gerdesj|2 years ago|reply
old.reddit.com looks rather dated to this 53 y/o bloke. Very busy too. I don't actually care because content is king and presentation is not but it would be nice if it looks good. Modern Reddit looks OK to me but I have recently deleted all comments I've ever made on Reddit and also my account. I will keep the mail alias alive for a while to see what shite turns up.

For me Reddit was a new and vaguely exciting thing once and I used it for around a decade and have now discarded it. I've dumped the Register too after around 20 years. I have no idea why I still have a /. account! that's next along with Facebook.

Back in the day I was asked to investigate this new fangled world wide web thing by an org with loads of cash and twiddling thumbs and I reported back it looked a lot like Gopher and WAIS but different. I might have also mentioned Teletext too.

I'm not an evangelist worth listening to but I've been here before. Just allow yourself to destroy accounts on systems that are no longer useful or productive anymore.

Move on.

[+] courseofaction|2 years ago|reply
I am a fan of the software but I agree that the default design is horrible, it would probably serve Lemmy to get that addressed ASAP to get more people in the door.

It's open source, any UI/UX people spot some low-hanging fruit?

https://github.com/LemmyNet/

[+] Okawari|2 years ago|reply
Lemmy supports alternate frontends.

I'm kinda intrigued by https://fedibb.ml/, which replicates the default phpBB theme.

[+] rglullis|2 years ago|reply
It's quite easy to change the css from Lemmy, and from a quick look their HTML is reasonably clean. I'm tempted to attempt it.
[+] tester457|2 years ago|reply
Same. However it seems most people don't like the old.reddit look, only 4% of redditors use it. Most people are content with the slow bloated new reddit.

When redditors talked about what sites to migrate to most of them preferred the modern interfaces over text based ones like tildes.net.

[+] alex3305|2 years ago|reply
Completely agree. More so because font sizing is IMHO all over the place. I'm using my OS and browsers' zoom because I'm visually impaired and than Lemmy is kind of a mess.
[+] jacooper|2 years ago|reply
No, please no, if Lemmy looked like old.reddit no body will ever use it. There are custom themes, but it should be never the default.
[+] xigoi|2 years ago|reply
Old Reddit is not responsive.
[+] dragontamer|2 years ago|reply
There were some Lemmy-related discussions going on this past weekend. I think this is the one tidbit everyone around Hacker News wants to know:

> The current VPS couldn't be resized that much anymore, and load was going up with all the new users. So I bought the same server at Hetzner: a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server. (For Mastodon, I doubled the RAM. For Lemmy I don't think it's needed yet.) I migrated the Lemmy software and database there, and moved over. This took 4 minutes of downtime.

So 32-core/64-threads with 128GB of RAM is running Lemmy.world, which is supporting ~36.7k users at the moment.

---------

A brief look at Hertzner comes up with: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/ax161

A 32-core/64 thread + 128GB RAM server in Germany for 142 EUR / month.

[+] creamyhorror|2 years ago|reply
32 cores and/or 128GB RAM - for how many concurrent users, 36.7k? It seems like Lemmy requires a fair bit of resources per user for a primarily text-based API, more than I'd expected. Wonder where the majority of the resource burden lies - uncached local database queries? Too many simultaneous database connections?
[+] gareve|2 years ago|reply
with some basic extrapolation, at how many users they'll hit the extra expensive Hertzner servers? or in other words, at which point they'll need to improve their architecture?
[+] TX81Z|2 years ago|reply
Having worked in the tech legal and compliance, privacy, and security spaces for a very long time the idea of letting thousands of strangers upload binary files to a server I’m legally liable for is terrifying.
[+] brightlancer|2 years ago|reply
Even "text" files can be encoded binary files -- it was a big shift in USENET.

I had a heated discussion with some Nostr advocates who thought that by calling servers "avocados" or something, then they wouldn't be responsible for what users posted on the "avocados".

I've not looked into ActivityPub or the Fediverse enough to know what is hosted locally and would (not) be protected by Sec 230, but it might drive some centralization toward corporations or other accountable organizations.

[+] dragontamer|2 years ago|reply
In practice, I think only the NSFW Lemmy's have to be worried.

This isn't straight binary file hosting. Its just text, image, and video. Images/Video can get into trouble but if you have a Safe-for-work only policy and defederate from NSFW instances, you're probably in the clear?

And I'm pretty sure any large amount of data is going to be throttled. So not even "big" videos are going to be hosted, more like a few-second .mp4 memes at best.

[+] MaxikCZ|2 years ago|reply
I want lemmy to succeed, but if it doesnt change, it never will.

I got the idea of "Ill find some communities from reddit there". Typed Lemmy into google, first result was relevant - good there. Got to mainpage, decision to join or create server - well, I chose join coz that seemed more instant.

But then it made me chose between several instances with no instant info about how will my choice affect what I see, and I just gave up there. I dont want to choose instance, I dont want to learn how it works. I want content first, and if I like it, then maybe I learn the inner workings to get more of it.

But as it stands now theres just no way Lemmy will ever become mainstream.

[+] spaduf|2 years ago|reply
It feels like there's an easy fix for this too. Instances already have an about section. Simply add a short form version that can be used in circumstances like this.
[+] cwkoss|2 years ago|reply
It's open source and user growth has recently exploded. It's going to be changing rapidly in the coming months.
[+] FullstakBlogger|2 years ago|reply
lemmy.world, for whatever reason, absolutely guzzles CPU cycles. I can't imagine what it could possibly need to do that requires executing that much javascript. It's all minimized, so it's hard to follow in the profiler.
[+] alephaleph|2 years ago|reply
Apparently it’s bc it uses websockets to live update vote counts or smth
[+] distcs|2 years ago|reply
> We're over 33k users now, having the second largest Lemmy server there is.

It became the largest a few hours ago!

[+] camdenlock|2 years ago|reply
Took a look at mastodon.world out of curiosity. Total conformity of belief on the entire front page timeline. Maybe it’s another one of those Mastodon instances where anti-capitalist social justice is the approved dogma, and dissenters are banned? Seems to be a lot of those…
[+] yosito|2 years ago|reply
The beauty of Mastodon is that you can set up your own server if you don't like how someone else runs theirs!
[+] kstrauser|2 years ago|reply
I run such a Mastodon instance. Go build your own and compete with me for users if you think there’s a demand for it.
[+] jbm|2 years ago|reply
Sorry to see you are being downvoted for making an observation.

I have been looking across various Lemmy instances and I recall seeing one or two that was cyberpunk-based or technology-focused in their local streams, but far too many have the "smug American Liberal" [1] style comments that made me leave Reddit [2].

Simply spinning up another community is not a quick fix either. Concern trolling means Centrist communities simply do not last, as they eventually get overrun by extremists of one kind of another. It's far, far too easy to take a complex argument and have it dishonestly re-interpreted in a negative way as a a one line meme in public communities. Weeding these people out is far more of a challenge than banning violent remarks, racists and child abusers, as well-meaning people will inevitably misunderstand.

The solution to this is small private communities and group chats with people you trust, personally. You won't get the hit from having constant content to consume, but it's not as bad for you; getting in the door is the real problem.

[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberal... [2] Signing up for an account because the defaults are crazy is not a viable solution

[+] jochem9|2 years ago|reply
Federated social media is currently predominantly housing innovators (maybe already some early adopters? One can hope). Innovators tend to look forward and are very open to change. With that mindset it's not hard to see how painfully obvious it is that capitalism isn't sustainable, while we absolutely need to move to a sustainable future. What that sustainable economic system looks like is obviously still unknown, hence lots of discussion.
[+] Vermyndax|2 years ago|reply
So, single server scaled vertically? Gross.
[+] anaganisk|2 years ago|reply
Is it /s? If not, deploying a kubernetes cluster and over engineering it?
[+] spicyusername|2 years ago|reply
The default Lemmy deployment docs don't have a lot of breathing room.

It would be reasonable to break off the postgres server Lemmy uses to a separate server, but at the moment there is only an Ansible playbook or a docker compose file, both of which assume a single server.

There's only so much time in the day and it's much easier to size up than reimplement the install process.