Back when I started this site around 2020 it was pretty much just me here. Most of the time the new user applications were from ultra lazy spammers peddling penis pills. I realized that all of you have been writing introductions but you don’t know much about me so here is somewhat of an introduction.
I’m just a regular guy in the Cleveland, Ohio area who works in tech. I have 3 cats. My hobbies are tech stuff, shooting/guns, gardening, lifting, and to a smaller degree talking about leftist politics. I run this instance as well as I can on my own. Sometimes the site will go down or be slow but you can rest assured that I’m most likely aware of it when that happens. I monitor this site pretty closely.
It definitely feels weird (in a good but anxiety inducing way) to see so many people using the server I set up. Before the influx it didn’t matter if the site was down for an hour or two while I worked out a deployment issue but that’s not the case anymore. I would like to bring more sys admins on board eventually so if you’re interested feel free to reach out.
Glad you’re all here!
I am a Linux sysadmin (Redhat and fedora mostly) at a local university for over 20 years. I would be happy to help in any sysadmin tasks.
I thought about setting up my own Lemmy instance. I’ve already set up my own matrix server and mastodon (gotosocial) server for only me, and I thought I’d give someone else’s lemmy instance a shot instead of building my own this time.
I’m running Ubuntu at the moment but feel free to join us in the Matrix chat linked in the sidebar!
Hey I work in tech and live in chicago. I’d be happy to help out in any way I can. I keep linux boxen alive for a living.
I live in Chicago and break linux boxes as a hobby!
me too
A fellow pro-gun leftist? (Milhouse hug dot gif)
Under no pretext my friend.
There are
dozensactually whole lot of us!
Thanks for hosting us!
I’m a software developer in the Chicago suburbs with an interest in DevOps, and a fair amount of experience with Linux, kubernetes, aws, and terraform. If that’s anything like your stack, I’m happy to help if I can.
Similar interests too, minus lifting plus fountain pens and woodworking. Ex-cat owner, sadly; both died of old age last year and my wife prefers we don’t get another until the kids are older.
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This place rocks
Cheers! Cincinnati checking in! Thank you for building this space for us to play in!
I went to college at UC, still get skyline from time to time.
Heyo, Northwest Ohio, checking in. Glad to be here.
Thanks for hosting the server. Scaling while being slammed is tough! I’ve noticed a few times the server is too loaded and try to come back later. With reddit down you’re essentially feeling ‘the slashdot effect’ (is that still a thing? lol). I’ll keep coming back and checking =)
I’ve done infra/ops for years, and been in your situation more than once. Take your time, you’ll get it all sorted out. John Allspaw wrote a good book about this subject, “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources”. There is a new edition out that I haven’t read, but all of the lessons learned in that book are still applicable today. The biggest thing that helped me was learning haproxy and figuring out how to spread out the load, minimize response times, as well as queue time.
So to a lay person, are the speed/responsiveness issues just because so many people are using all the servers, or is it this instance, or the Lemmy software (or a bit of all 3)? I tried posting a simple link too !nfl@lemmy.world and it just spun the whole time.
I would guess having not seen any logs or anything that the server might need more resources or is hitting some limit that hasn’t come up before. Like max open files or some sort of ram limit. I haven’t looked into running a lemmy instance yet but usually you can mess with the config and squeeze a little more life out of stuff. But it could be that the server itself needs to be more powerful.
I’ve had a lot of problems getting posts to load that are on other large instances. The whole ecosystem is probably just slammed right now. Reddit dying made people go “well whats a thing like reddit I could use instead” and we’re all just showing up load testing the small instances people set up for a small group of friends.
I like to think all of our Midwest internet traffic is meeting at the server and saying “Ope, sorry, after you…No I insist, after you.”
The growing pains don’t bother me too much, especially when the alternative is going back and accepting how bad reddit will progressively get as advertisers take over.
There’re so many fellow tech workers here too lol
Happy to be here. Glad there’s a midwest specific instance.
thank you for setting this up. Also, first fediverse post!
Im gonna miss reddit, but i really miss the (relative) locality of the old BBS days, and later, regional blog networks.
The internet feels less like a utility lately and i didnt realize how much i missed that
Hey there, neighbor. I’m on the I-70 corridor. I like that we have so many local people here.
i really miss the (relative) locality of the old BBS days
I was recalling BBS days with @TurtleTourParty’s “99.9999% uptime is overrated” remark. We really have become spoiled in little better than a quarter century. The typical BBS had one phone line. Once you got past a busy signal, you had to economize your time online to give other users a chance. You’d install an offline reader to download new mail, disconnect, reply at leisure, and upload when you got back in.
Aside from the local quality (enforced by a forgotten fact-of-life called “long distance charges,” defined as “not far outside city limits”), you never posted anything to discover someone else had replied simultaneously, because you were preventing them from doing so. I have fond memories of message boards that were games designed around this fact.
Have not tried it yet, but this promises to recapture some feel of the “good ol’ days.” I wish it included a sound effect of that satisfying “connected” modem squawk when you fired it up.
Thanks for running this instance. It makes the switch to Lemmy much easier with all the local communities. I already feel more at hone here than I have for a while on reddit.
99.9999% uptime is for overrated. We can put on some bug spray and step outside (or a coat for the glorious time of the year mosquitoes don’t try to carry me away) if the server goes down.
Maybe we can have a scheduled downtime every day for all of us to go outside at the same time.😅
Yeah but sometimes you just came inside and want to browse 😉 definitely understand where he’s coming from but it’d be nice to not have to switch to another account all the time
Hopefully next week’s release fixes it completely.
Thank you for setting this up and keeping it running. Did you have an “Oh shit” moment when you saw Redditors start suggesting Lemmy as an alternative during the API fiasco?
I’m just a simple technical writer with no SysAdmin experience, but good look on the search for help.
I had stopped using reddit too much so I didn’t know they were talking about lemmy until I started getting a steady stream of applications.
Another technical writer? In the Midwest? I’m not alone!
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Glad to be here!
I’m glad this space exists! As a fellow Clevelander, hope you are enjoying the rain.
