Hey folks,
Just wanted to give everyone a little update on the direction of our community as well as house keeping best practices moving forward.
I’ll start with the hottest topic. As you guys are surely aware and have experienced, Lemmy.world has struggled with uptime recently. Long story story, the folks running this instance are saying this is due to the fact it is a targeted DDOS attack (post here).
Nonetheless, the mods did discuss the pros and cons of possibly moving to another instance or creating a “backup instance”. Neither of these seemed viable as it creates a confusion, a fragmented /c/gunners community and difficulty in moderation. Most importantly, despite its issue, Lemmy.world’s uptime isn’t significantly worse than that of other instances despite being several magnitudes bigger (data available here). Being in the biggest instances significantly eases discoverability, especially for someone new to Lemmy. With that in mind, it seemed obvious that the best decision is to stay with Lemmy.world.
While we’re on the topic of Lemmy.world, when Threads was just launched and also when Twitter (also known as X, but I’m calling it Twitter) started locking Twitter content behind sign-ins and rate limits, etc we announced temporary recommendations on how to post Threads and Twitter content. The idea was that eventually Lemmy.world would make a decision on what their relationship with Threads would be like. In the end, their decision was basically a wait and see policy.
So keeping in mind that Twitter API does not work with Lemmy (and Elon can go back to his old ways at any time), and some people have very strong opinions against Meta getting into the fediverse - let’s create a simple rule around both Twitter and Thread tweets/posts.
Rules:
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There must always be a way for a user to view the full text of the tweet/post without having to click the Twitter/Thread link.
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There must be a link available somewhere in the post for those who want to view the source content
There’s two “best practice” ways we can do this:
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Screenshot the tweet/threads post, and short summary (including person who tweeted) in the title (because there’s a very short character limit for posts on Lemmy) and then full tweet/post content in the body with the link below the text (also in the body). I recommend this as it is visually the best way to share content especially since football content often has photos as well.
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Insert the link to the tweet/post in the URL field. Short summary (including person who tweeted) in the title and full text in the body. This is for people who don’t want to screenshot the post. Isn’t as visually appealing, but the user gets all the information they need anyway so I think it’s fine - we don’t want to create too many barriers of entry to posting.
Happy to discuss any of the topics above (or even others). I think we’re fluid with our decisions - we’re trying to make decisions that are as comfortable for all as possible and encourage interaction and engagement as we grow this community.–
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Great work. I was of a mind that a move onto another instance would be good, but if the evidence points to no significant gain then I’m happy.
Yea, we’ll continue to monitor this and see if things get worse. I know the uptime keeps dropping at Lemmy.world every month. If it reaches the point where gap between LW and other instances is big, then we’ll definitely reassess. But right now it’s ~1-2% and with LW almost 10x the size of most instances, this just makes more sense.
It surprises me that other servers can’t offer more uptime.
Well, if Lemmy.world’s issues are due to DDOS attacks and not due to scaling issues, then it’s not really hard to see other other instances suffering from similar issues.
To be honest, Lemmy before recently, was a pretty basic rudimentary tool. It was really held together on the backend with some proverbial paperclips and tape. Now that there are a lot more eyes on the platform, the developers are trying to create a better platform as fast as possible but at the same time I guess there are some bad actors taking advantage of the fact the Lemmy wasn’t really coded for communities this large so we don’t have the protections in place to prevent these sorts of attacks.
Erm, I don’t want to call it a lie, but the information is slightly off. World is down way more than any other instance. Anyone who believes otherwise, doesn’t have a login on another instance. And while they are indeed getting DDoS attacks, most often than not, it’s bad queries sinking their server due to the lack of SQL optimisation. Obviously this is getting better with every release. But it won’t be actually fixed soon.
The second thing that stood out is discoverability. Huh? The first five pages of the community listing don’t show anything to do with football. Compare that to fanaticus.social and you instantly feel that you’re in a sport server.
If I press local and browse world’s local feed, I don’t see any football talk. Obviously this is better about match time. But the discoverability is nowhere to be seen. I’m not saying we should be going into other fans communities, but seeing them around more often would allow us to feel like a bigger part of a whole.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way implying that the world admins aren’t amazing. I’m just saying that given their success, the football communities get drowned out and its counterproductive to making the wider football community on here grow.
Ask yourself, what do you love by moving to a new instance? Nothing, everyone on world will still be able to access it and post but when they check the instance, they’ll be able to see all the football communities and the general communities like [email protected] and [email protected] will be a hive of activity.
Anyway, it’s up to you guys, but hand on heart, as things stand, we’re incapable of being the force we should be. The fediverse is literally about decentralization, there’s zero need to be on the biggest server, when the actual quality of life is better elsewhere.
Yea, I did mention in another comment that the uptime is continuing to go down from month to month and we will continue to monitor it.
As for the discoverability, perhaps it is my bad phrasing, but the point is that is it generally easier for a new user to search for communities within their own instances. And since Lemmy.world is so much bigger than everyone else right now, it helps us in being discovered by new users.
This can change in the future, and like I said, we’re fluid in how we approach this. But right now, we will stick to Lemmy.world for the time being. If uptime gets worse, we’ll re-evaluate this. This month it is at 92% which is poor but the admins say they can fix this, and we want to give them every opportunity to fix this.
I would like to bring your attention to support.futball. Maybe you and the other footie admins can have a word with the admin of that instance and see if it might be a viable home or even just to feel it out.
