When you notice Lemmy is quieter than usual, then have a look at the Lemmy.world status - eviltoast

Seems like they are under attack again, will those people never stop? I feel sorry for the admin team.

  • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Myself and another developer are working on something we think will solve this:

    OP: https://lemm.ee/post/2800726 TLDR: Automatic User Distribution

    Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:

    • look at the recommender list
    • find the server that is most under capacity
    • have a very large iframe with “Sign up for Lemmy (using [under capacity server here])”
    • have a small “No, I want to sign up specifically on Lemmy.world” option
    • Midas@ymmel.nl
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      1 year ago

      Would also be cool to have like a short questionnaire, like picking your class in Morrowind, but instead you end up on a German industrial metal music instance.

    • jarfil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Does it take into account instance rules like language, moderation, or whether it’s a personal instance hosted on a raspi that may go down at any moment?

      • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yes! Lemmy.world (or any other big server) must manually add the-other-server to their “recommder” list. So the-other-server has to prove to Lemmy.world that they’re going to offer similar reliability.

      • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        People are talking about capacity because they clearly don’t understand what’s really happening here, they think that it’s Reddit’s hug of death (that too many users are causing the site to go over capacity) when in reality it’s an attack, these outages are being caused by attackers intentionally not by a swarm of people unintentionally.

      • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I agree capacity isn’t the cause of outages. Centralization is an issue, and capacity is a way for a server like Lemmy.world to say “I would prefer less new users”

          • jeffhykin@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Agreed, in my original post I mentioned posts per day as a metric thats slightly closer to actual load. But its pretty hard to throttle number of posts, so I think users is going to be a more useful value.

            If a server has really active users they can set a lower target number of users.

            Eventually it would be nice to have a standardized way of migrating and backing up accounts to make it possible for one server to offload its existing users to another server.