this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Lemmy.World Announcements

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At the time of writing, Lemmyworld has the second highest number of active users (compared to all lemmy instances)

Also at the time of writing, Lemmyworld has >99% uptime.

By comparison, other lemmy instances with as many users as Lemmyworld keep going down.

What optimizations has Lemmyworld made to their hosting configuration that has made it more resilient than other instances' hosting configurations?

See also Does Lemmy cache the frontpage by default (read-only)? on !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

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[โ€“] PriorProject@lemmy.world 167 points 1 year ago (46 children)

I'm not an admin, but have followed the sizing discussions around the lemmyverse as closely as I can from my position of lacking first-hand knowledge:

  • lemmy.ml is the biggest instance by user count, but runs on incredibly modest 8-cpu hardware. Their cloud provider doesn't provide any easy scale up options for them, so they can't trivially restart on a bigger VM with their db and disk in place. I suspect this means that instance is going to suffer for a bit as they figure out what to do next.
  • lemmy.world on the other hand was running on a box at least twice as big as lemmy.ml at last count, and I believe they can go quite a bit bigger if they need to.
  • The lemmy.world admins also run mastodon.world and lived through the twitterpocalypse, seeing peak user registrations rates of 4k per hour. So this is not their first rodeo in terms of explosive growth, I'm sure that experience gives them some tricks up their sleeve.
  • The admin team is pretty clearly technically strong. If I recall correctly, ruud is a professional database admin. One of the spooky parts of Lemmy performance-wise is the db. If ruud or others on the admin team custom-tuned their pg setup based on their own analysis of how/why it's slow, they may be getting more performance per CPU cycle than other instances running more stock configs or that are cargo-culting tweaks that aren't optimal for their setup without understanding what makes them work.

I'm surprised that sh.itjust.works isn't growing faster. They also have a hefty hardware setup and seemingly the technical admins to handle big user counts. I wonder if it's a branding problem, where lemmy.world sounds inviting and plausibly serious where sh.itjust.works sounds like clowntown even though it's run by a capable and serious team.

[โ€“] Pspspspspsps@lemmy.world 128 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I wonder if it's a branding problem, where lemmy.world sounds inviting and plausibly serious where sh.itjust.works sounds like clowntown

That was my thought process when choosing an instance tbh. I'm not a tech person, I looked at the list and lemmy.world was the first 'safest feeling' instance that had open sign up. I saw sh.itjust.works and didn't even check their sign up process, there was too many periods in the strange name and it just looks weird to me as someone not used to these things. Edit: spelling

[โ€“] Z______@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I definitely second the motion on it being a branding problem. Stuff like sh.itjust.works seem to me like something that dark basement tech nerds would come up with that is "edgy" and really only used by them and other people like them.

I'm not really into the ironic "edgy" aesthetic and part of the struggle with this transition for me has been orienting myself in the space because I don't want to commit to some "sketchy" edgelord URL

[โ€“] darkwing_duck@sh.itjust.works 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

something that dark basement tech nerds would come up with that is โ€œedgyโ€ and really only used by them and other people like them.

That's exactly what it is and why I love it. The whole thing about this federated networking is that it doesn't matter where you signed up.

[โ€“] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Where you sign up entirely determines your local feed.

Just like with reddit, I don't use defaults.

[โ€“] Mjb@feddit.uk 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The least useful of the three feeds

[โ€“] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Depending on where you sign up, it could be the most useful.

[โ€“] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Where you sign up greatly effects moderation and administration issues like updating the software the instance runs on to benefit from security fixes, optimizations, and enhancements.

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