Some of the planned blackouts will be temporary, others plan to shut their subreddits down indefinitely in protest.

  • Geronimo Wenja
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    911 months ago

    Out of interest, is it better for server load to have new instances federating, or to have users using the instance directly? I assumed that the reliable way of handling this would be to run my own instance and keep it closed for friends I know in real life to use. I don’t want to moderate a community, but I also like the reliability (and fun) of self-hosting, and knowing I can just stop using a server if their instance rules change to be against my own principals without losing my user history etc.

    How does that mesh with what Lemmy is trying to do? I know I’m going to be in the vast minority here, but I’d like to know if I’m exacerbating load issues.

    • @[email protected]
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      811 months ago

      I am not an expert, but I think join lemmy suggested joining smaller instances and federating.

      • Geronimo Wenja
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        11 months ago

        This would make sense to me - I assume it’s the equivalent of a single user seeing basically everything on a given community once, vs loading it from DB (or at least cache) for every request for each new individual user. Every time I load the front page on my server, it’s just fetching stuff from my own instance, right?

        EDIT: Looks like it does load things from other servers, but only images. Everything else comes from my own instance.

        • @[email protected]
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          711 months ago

          I’m considering hosting my own instance. Can you point me to where i can get started? I’m a noob.

          • Geronimo Wenja
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            611 months ago

            You’ll want to start here, but it depends how comfortable you are with self-hosting as to whether it’ll be a walk in the park. I had good luck with it, but I self host a lot of stuff and know what kinds of pitfalls there are. The docs aren’t totally up to par - I might take a look at contributing to improving them - so you may need to do some searching around if you have problems. There’s a Lemmy Support community on lemmy.ml you could check out too.

            • @[email protected]
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              111 months ago

              Right-on, thanks! It helps just to have a little direction—even if imperfect. I usually seek out multiple sources, anyway.

      • @[email protected]
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        611 months ago

        The issue is that some instances are having trouble federating. It took me a while to find my small community from lemmy.world - and when I did the upvotes and comments were all incorrect (many not showing up). Checked on beehaw and couldn’t even find my community

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      The load issues are because of users directly connecting to lemmy.ml. Federation isnt using many resources, so its best if users spread out across different instances.

      • @[email protected]
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        411 months ago

        What does it take to spin up an instance and federate? Can I just grab a docker image and go with some cloud Linux instance? What resources are we looking at for what headcount of users / level of engagement? (ie, posts and or connections per minute, etc)

        • SpoilerTV
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          411 months ago

          @whitehatbofh @nutomic

          I run a small instance for a few of our staff and a couple of rss/bot accounts.

          I use a small DigitalOcean droplet that installs the software automatically. Very easy to run with a small number of people.

          Running on a very small server. 4 GB Memory / 80 GB Disk . Works well.

          I might not be your best example though

      • Geronimo Wenja
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        211 months ago

        Thanks for the confirmation, glad to not be adding more than my fair share.