You're thinking about it the wrong way. Despite a major hub of lemmy being down if you have an account on another instance you can continue using the network nearly as though nothing had happened. Individual instances may have greater or lesser reliability but the social network is very robust.
If thats how Lemmy should be used it would be helpful if we could identify yourself across servers. Like email has pgp that lets you sign your emails to prove it's really you. Would be cool. 😎
Yeah I think the fediverse biggest limitation in general to achieving most of its stated goals is the fact that accounts are bound tightly to an instance
I follow nine other instances.
Then you should appreciate that the reliability of the social network is just fine. The idea is this social network isn't dependent on one instance.
Now, granted, if a big one struggles, the network loses some communities temporarily, but the network is stable and other instances remain active.
It's just growing pains from an extreme influx almost literally overnight and generally just that this is somewhat early days. It's going to be messy, it always is early on, no matter what the social network.
Also...there's a non-zero chance it's getting hit relentlessly by DDOS.
What's DDOS?
DDOS = denial of service attack. Attacker sends a bunch of requests overloading a service and causing other clients to experience.timeouts due to the service not being.abe.to.handle the load.
It's like a group of people standing in line for the cashier and they each buy a single peanut with cash and have a question to the manager.
I like that picture, it makes it easier to understand for people who aren't that much into computers.
And now you can use that picture to even extend it with: We're currently enjoying our checkout at different registers, where there's not peanut nutjobs at the register. I like it too.
Distributed denial of service.
That first D is the one that makes the attack a real problem.
Lemmy is still alpha software, thrust into the limelight by the fall of Reddit. It is still in its infancy. Reddit has had over 18 years to get it right. So it will take some time.
I didn't think of it that way.
I think there was a new version of lemmy released so the instance may be in the process of being updated.
I've started a 2nd account on another instance just for situations like that.
How do you keep communities aligned across the accounts?
I made a tool that can help: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
It allows you to synchronize subscriptions, blocks, and profile settings between accounts.
(though FYI different versions only gracefully handle a specific API version at a time so there's some limitations right now as instances upgrade from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3 - see my comment here: https://lemmy.ml/comment/2094948 )
EDIT: Second link isn't working - must be a Lemmy bug. But you can see it as a recent post on my profile.
The Lemmy.world server runs on a 16mhz 386dx and has 16mb of ram. It just does that sometimes.
It temporarily goes down when the laptop gets moved to another Starbucks location.
Its on its infancy and remember this is not run by a big corporation its run by volunteers. If you dont like feel free to go back to reddit.
Edit: Hey guys so yeah this comment was too harsh against newcomers to the platform and I would like to apologize.
While you are correct, your tone is quite dismissive and unwelcoming. If it's to be a replacement, it's reliability is relevant. On most of the update posts ive seen, users are generally appreciative of the work done.
Lemmy.world isn't meant to replace Reddit. The fediverse and various implementations of the ActivityPub protocol are. Lemmy and Kbin appear to be some of the frontrunners, but lemmy.world isn't a lynchpin. Other Lemmy instances are up. And it's a bit naive to expect mostly volunteer servers to have the same uptime as a well-founded corporation. And let's remember, reddit used to go down a lot more early in its life compared to late in life (and it'd still go down then).
Plus, it's still a bit entitled to expect uptime just because they have an intent to provide what they believe is a better service than reddit. It's not only about folks ingesting content, but also those who create and moderate.
It's reliability has been pretty good all things considered.
Yeah, if it's a roll of the dice whether the platform will be accessible on any day, people will eventually go somewhere else.
It's definitely bad if you can't use a service you'd like to use but one has to remember that this isn't run by someone with millions of dollars at their fingertips. And the reason for that is simple: This service doesn't exploit it's users.
https://lemmy-world.statuspage.io/
They're working on it.
That db migration must be massive for them given there's an 80% expected size decrease.
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