Early on we were experimenting with trying to offer everything on the fediverse from a Lemmy instance. A lot of changes and tweaks were made to try to make that work before it was abandoned. There’s a lot of leftover bloat from that project that we’ve been trying to deal with without too much impact to the Lemmy instance but for the size of the instance it makes more sense to start over than to spend even more time trying to undo the wrongs of the past. There isn’t a specific cautionary tale here besides “don’t go public with things that you hope to fix later.”

More recently we’ve had issues with our registrar or DNS pop up that no one seems to have answers for yet, so sometimes the domain itself isn’t reachable. One problem or the other might not be a huge deal in the short term but together they make for a miserable time trying to sort things out. Moving the traffic to a known good config will help me maintain sanity while dealing with the issues at WG.

Lemmy has mangled that script a bit.

Lemmy seems to mangle a lot of links that aren’t basic urls. SimpleX chat links break for some reason here too.

Thank you for the suggestions. At this point it seems the best option may be to just shutter this instance and start over with a fresh database instead of dealing with a bunch of nagging problems from previous experiments. I’ve done plenty of testing in production because for most of that time it was only me being affected by the consequences lol.

For those who may not be aware there are alternative front ends available for Lemmy.

MLMYM is like old reddit. You can see what it looks like here:

mlmym.walledgarden.xyz

Voyager is multi platform interface that also offers a Lemmy frontend. Our implementation is here:

voyager.walledgarden.xyz

Very possible, arguably even probable.

It could very well be a PR stunt but the content in the OP is “real” in the sense that it matches what’s being reported and isn’t photoshopped or something.

A quick search returning several news articles suggests it’s real. Pretty gross.

Nice meme you fucking nerd.

I’m aware. It’s part of the ridiculousness just like the OP.

The real hero’s are the terrorists we made along the way?

It was posted here six days ago

https://lemmy.world/post/22403037

I’m not sure it’s been entirely solved. Our host is working through an unrelated hardware problem that hit in the middle of our last round of tuning but things have been behaving better aside from that.

The answer for us has been in adjusting the lemmy pool size to the database and tweaking the available resources to find a happy medium.

Can my humble, single-user instance handle it?

Maybe?

FWIW this information is based on the experience when using remote hosting not self hosting.

The main issue for us was tuning the database performance. The bot can beat your database to death sometimes and just throwing resources at it won’t necessarily solve it. related low effort meme Our experience was that the bot performance hit wasn’t really noticable immediately but it adds up as more and more communities are added to the database. There also seem to be bursts of database load at times, maybe that’s when new instances join the network? They seem to only last a short time though and haven’t really caused problems.

TLDR- Expect an eventual performance hit. If it’s too much you can always disable the bot or adjust what it does.

It needs to feel like a walled garden.

Imagine that.

i also noticed a recent sync in-congruence from .ml to .world which indicates some kind of funny business… purposeful or not

This isn’t unique to world or ml. There’s some wonky shit going on with federating across Lemmy at the very least, maybe other parts of the fediverse that I don’t use. On walledgarden there are at least half a dozen instances that are falling in and out of sync with our communities. No one on either side of the connection seems to have an answer for what caused this behavior or how to correct it. Talking to some other instances, we aren’t alone.

The lemmyverse crawler/site has also shown some odd behavior with communities and instances disappearing and reappearing seemingly at random.

I don’t think anything malicious is being done by any of the instances or admins in regards to federation delays.

Back when I used reddit it seemed like everyone threw around Fascist in a similar way. Lemmy seems to prefer Tankie. For a lot of people the thinking doesn’t go any farther than “I disagree with you, therefore you are ________ist” or whatever.

It is what it is.

Bingo.

Sure! But, in this case Lemmy is literally a federated copypasta of Reddit, like Madtodon is of X.

This is being overly simplistic IMO. Lemmy is not a direct copy paste of reddit, just the idea is the same. Lemmy is missing many of the tools reddit has come to depend on for things like moderation and community engagement. The idea is the same but the framework is different and that comes with its own challenges.

Lemmy is a good enough platform for now and for future growth. It wasn’t a drop in replacement for reddit when the exodus happened and it isn’t a drop in replacement now, but it’s closer. There are still lots of little things- quality of life improvements, moderation improvements, discovery improvements, etc that need to be tuned or fixed before Lemmy is ready to shoulder millions of active users, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of the effort today.

The beautiful part of the fediverse is we’re all free to form our own ideas about how it’s best grown and supported. If there’s something you are passionate about there’s nothing stopping you or anyone else from spinning up a community or instance about it and creating the niche communities everyone seems to miss. It all takes time, and individual and group efforts.

There’s nothing wrong with this approach either but I’d remind you and anyone else seeking this experience that Lemmy is infinitely more customizable for this than reddit ever was. The ability to block users, communities, instances, etc can be invaluable. Some instances also don’t federate with everyone so it’s fairly easy to find a smaller space that isn’t so busy if the larger instances are too much.

Lemmy gets a lot of shit, and deservedly so at times, but there are already some very handy tools in the kit for curating your feed to your liking.