Hello there!
It has been a while since our last update, but it’s about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.
So let’s go over some of these misconceptions together.
“Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse”.
While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network
The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don’t like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.
And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members.
“Lemmy.World should close down registrations”
Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what’s what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn’t even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.
Which brings us to the third point:
“Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that’s why the server is down all the time”
This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.
The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they’ll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very ‘expensive’ sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.
So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That’s one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.
“Why do they need another sysop who works for free”
Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.
We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.
What I find most ridiculous about people claiming lemmy.world is too big and therefore bad for the Fediverse is simply… Have you people wondered why it got so big?
During the crucial first weeks of the Reddit migration, the single time period with the most chance of bringing new users, pretty much all larger Lemmy instances closed their registrations - they couldn’t handle the influx. Other big ones decided to immediately defederate everybody, they were afraid of having to moderate content. And a few did remain open and federated, but they were also extremely niche and focused on their own political side of the spectrum.
Lemmy.world however remained open, remained with active admins that helped the first moderators, and kept upgrading the server at a very fast rate - you might forget it now, but Lemmy was massively slow and frustrating and then a new Lemmy.world update would drop and it would feel like a different website.
So yeah, “bad for the Fediverse” for being the only instance that kept up with the demand at the most necessary time.
Thanks Lemmy.world team.
And besides closing registrations, many others required that you request it, then wait for approval. Of course most went with the path of least resistance - I know I did (using an alt account now because of the DDOS attacks).