Status update July 4th
Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.
Issues
As you might have noticed, things still won’t work as desired… we see several issues:
Performance
- Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
- We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
- System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)
Bugs
- Replying to a DM doesn’t seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
- 2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn’t always work as expected.
Troubleshooting
We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml is also helping with current issues.
So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we’ll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!
As somebody who flocked to Voat during the height of the Ellen Pao controversy and remembered the site being rendered unusable for whole days at a time from the Reddit Hug of Death, I’m remarkably surprised at how well Lemmy.world has held up. I thought the fediverse would have truly crumbled from this exodus.
I remember when Voat came out and the slight exedous that brought. I made an account and everything but it never properly took off. I checked on it two or three years later and it was just filled with alt-right/racist/transphobic garbage. Sad it never took off as a reddit alternative, reddit likely would have greatly benefited from a proper alternative, not sad it closed down after I saw what it ended up.
So far the fediverse feels really different tho, very explicitly anti that type of shit. I’m sure it will pop up, they always do, but maybe now people know how to deal with it. Block it, defederate, deplatform.
FYI, it has popped up
explodingheadsis a great example but many servers including lemmy.world became proactive in defederating from the instanceYeah, but as soon as instances defederated from there, those bigots started making alts on those instances.
Because it’s not enough for them to have their own safe space for bigotry, they want to argue that bigotry is ok so they get their rage fix from arguing online.
If Lemmy can instances can’t IP ban like reddit does, they’re just going to keep making accounts here every time they’re banned. Then go to exploding heads to circle jerk about how they got banned again.
One can also increase the cost of registration by requiring some questions and a waiting period. Adding friction makes this attack a lot less fun for the attacker.
It’s not a perfect solution, but perfect must not be the enemy of good.
At the same time, it’s also not suitable for a server the size of lemmy.world. We just have too many users, and enough new people joining that we’d need several people whose singular task was to process registrations in that case.
One of the only servers I’ve defederated my personal instance from.
Lemmy is a distributed system that can’t quite be perma-killed, kind of like ye olde usenet. Anyone can create a new instance at will.