Um yeah, I’m not seeing that. You can see monthly active users on https://the-federation.info/platform/21 and it’s been fluctuating up and down, no big jump. So I call bullshit on that article based on the metric there. Though no doubt as Twitter (X) implodes Mastodon will see the fallout with higher activity.
Only instances with a “.ml” at the end of the name may or may not be affected. Lemmy is a collection of instances so the loss of a few will not cripple the whole thing. Content over the whole is not greatly affected.
If your home log-in instance is one that’s affected, you’ll have to find a new one. You’ll know right away because the instance will be unreachable. Not a big deal, last time I looked there was over 1200 instances to chose from.
Another consideration is any communities living on an affected instance may have issues. All communities are common to Lemmy, but each originates from a particular instance. We’ve not yet seen a major instance go down so I don’t know how Lemmy deals with communities getting orphaned like that.
lemmy.ml is still up as of right now. Possibly they contracted a subscription to the domain name to keep it up. They had to do something to retain it otherwise the site would be unreachable. If lemmy.ml does have to change names it will be a hassle since I’ve got a good number of community subscriptions there.
This wouldn’t happen to an instance with a regularly subscribed domain name. Problem is the .ml domains were free and the associated country decided to claim them back. The risk of using a free top level domain is something that should have been considered. I don’t think it’s worth the risk versus the cost savings considering how difficult it is to migrate a Lemmy instance.
Thanks for that, was concerned about keeping my subscription to that community. Keep us posted and let us know where you end up so I can change over my community subscription.
Anyway I think the lesson learned here is don’t use free TLDs. Lemmy is not at all designed to deal with domain name changes.
Well said. I think people tend to think of the Fediverse as a competitor, but the goals are not the same. The Fediverse is wholly about the community driven by the community.
It should get fixed in Memmy soon. Even on desktop browser they only starting with v0.18.0 of the web client.
do you have a recommendation for a good BSD derivative distribution to try?
The thing about BSD is it’s fully POSIX compliant which can be good and bad. The good is it’s highly consistent in terms of architecture and how things operate. The bad is standards constraints can limit flexibility. Linux is somewhat POSIX compliant, but has a tendency to go off the rails at times. In any case if you’re comfortable with Linux you’ll be comfortable with BSD right out of the gate.
Linux can suffer a lot from fragmentation due it’s market bazaar style development. FreeBSD is run by a single entity responsible for design top to bottom. There’s been some big changes to Linux in modern times I don’t really care for (such as systemd). With BSD you always know what to expect. You won’t get blindsided by some off the wall change in architecture or design which happens a lot with Linux.
There’s a number of BSD distributions that are open source and free. The main open source BSD distros are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and DragonFly BSD. FreeBSD is most popular and is designed to be good all around. It’s probably going to have the best device support, but other BSDs can have other strengths. For example DragonFly BSD is stronger for desktop use.
Honestly the best application for BSD is in a sever or development environment. Linux is more advanced when it comes to support for desktop use. Though I think BSD provides a much cleaner and consistent operating system as it conforms to specific standards. You can get it to work well for desktop use with a little extra work and preselection of compatible hardware.
Did that once many years ago on a Linux system, wanted to delete a directory tree, but I was logged in as root and didn’t realize I was at the root prompt. Wiped out the whole drive. Not a big deal since it was just a test install so I was being careless anyway.
Back then Linux didn’t protect root from making stupid mistakes. I think now you need another switch to actually delete the root directory. I’ve since gone to using FreeBSD mainly and I haven’t tried it there, but I think at root as root you can still wipe the drive with that command. FreeBSD is less idiot proof than Linux. I think iOS is based on BSD Unix, isn’t it?
Some thoughts on that, Reddit has half a billion monthly active users. Lemmy has about 50k monthly active users. That’s .01% or one ten thousandth. We won’t be displacing Reddit anytime soon, but then we don’t want to. That’s the main problem with Reddit, it’s too damn big and too damn corporate. The main thing is Lemmy sees enough growth to stay relevant and viable. It doesn’t have to compete with anyone.
Good for you lemmy.world, congrats!
BTW, lemmy.world is #1 in the node sort by total users at the-federation.info
Now the trick is to keep the instance running well with that crazy high user load.
I actually wondered about that. The way instances share data and store it is all pretty black box to me.
Not being up on (or caring about) what evil Meta is up to I was wondering how they got 90M users overnight, that splains it.
I’m going to have a go at explaining how to use Lemmy in a simple way.
You only need one good instance to access all of Lemmy, but it can be nice to have an alternate in case the primary goes offline for some reason. For best network performance try instances in your region. You can sort instances by country here; https://the-federation.info/platform/73 When you find one that works well for you, make it your regular login instance.
Once you find a home instance, go to lemmyverse.net/communities to find communities of interest. Copy the link on lemmyverse by clicking on it (i.e. !technology@lemmy.ml) then paste into the search box on the communities page in Lemmy. Click on the listing from the search results then select the Subscribe button. It may show “Pending” for a short time then turn to “Joined”. If it doesn’t change right away don’t worry about it. You’re in even though it may look stuck.
The front page view defaults to Local, you don’t want that. Go to your profile settings and set the view to “Subscribed” (you could use “All”, but your front page will have a ton of junk you don’t want to see).
That’s it, you’re ready to use Lemmy. Of course this is for desktop browser. I’m not familiar with the Liftoff mobile app for Lemmy so I don’t have directions for that.
Additional; there’s other things to know about such as federation which involves blocked and linked instances, but to start just avoid communities on beehaw.org since that instance is one known to block other legit instances. If there is a community on beehaw.org you really want to interact with, you have to check your login instance is not blocked there. There’s a procedure for that, but I’ll spare you the information overload.
Okay, hope that helps and enjoy!
We’re a bunch of geeks with anarchist leanings, and so probably wouldn’t switch to Threads anyway.
You know me, haha
It’s like a scam isn’t it, use chat bots to make your site look huge to sell high dollar add space and get big money from investors. It’s almost kind of comical, spending all that money to advertise to a bunch of bots.
I’ve been here since mid June and have made 264 posts,
I have almost 300 comments over three weeks now. I actually had Lemmy bookmarked for some time, but started participating after giving Reddit the punt. That’s way higher post frequency than before. Yeah it’s great feeling like you can say reasonable stuff without coming under attack.
Yeah I’m one of the 90% here, except for the Linux part, FreeBSD man. No problem with that and it would fine with me if it doesn’t change. Talking to my peeps here.
It would be convenient to have a Fediverse wide login, but it would carry too much baggage in terms of overhead and security. They’d have to carry the whole of the user database across all of the Fediverse, not really feasible. Then there’s security concerns over sensitive data like email and passwords. So probably not something that could ever happen.
A sync feature between instances might be do-able. Could be handy. I have a couple instances where I’d like to sync community subscriptions.
Exactly, not a hypothetical question here, we have historical evidence to show it’s fact.
Haha, I know the most appropriate iteration, a red background with the X in a white circle.