So after we’ve extended the virtual cloud server twice, we’re at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news… we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores “Rome” CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it’s back. After that I’ll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.

    • impulse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 年前

      Truth is for me as someone who used Reddit for about the last 16 years, it very much feels like the early days of Reddit again.

      Which is a very good thing, because that’s what I originally signed up for compared to a metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

      I just hope it gains enough traction to be sustainable in the long run, especially considering that it’s relying on donations for funding, I believe?

      • bandario@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 年前

        undefined> metric fuckton of karma farming spam bots.

        People are hard at work writing bots for lemmy so don’t worry, you’ll be able to enjoy your regular hogwash again really soon.

        Personally I think lemmy should go as far out of its way as possible to make bots in any and all forms just about impossible.

    • Maiznieks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 年前

      Found one russian troll already. Oh well…

      Edit: lol, was not referring to OP, it was some world news post comment with chiese username that spread misinformation about russian war in ukraine. I just added my thoughts on the community.

  • naughty@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    2 年前

    I hope not all people will go back to reddit as soon as the communities go public again.

    • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 年前

      The two day blackout was what finally got me to actually look into the fediverse, figure out servers and whatnot, and make an account to try it out. I’ve been meaning to look into it for a while, but the blackout was the push I needed. I’m sure I’m not alone. I’m far more interested in exploring this exciting new space then I am going back to the garbage filled Reddit, even if they miraculously back down on the API changes .

      My reddit account was over 10 years old. This is my first comment on Lemmy/Fediverse.

    • Cycrus93@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 年前

      I will stay here. Did not have this feeling of internet independence for a very long time. I’m done with Reddit.

  • dystop@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 年前

    I’m not an engineer or a dev - but requiring a 32-core, $2000+ CPU to support 12k users doesn’t seem like it would scale well. Is this normal, or does the fediverse require more computational resources than a simpler setup like reddit? How would a fediverse instance with 100k users be maintained?

    • Black616Angel@feddit.deEnglish
      6·
      2 年前

      Look at the pricing!

      Hetzner wants 150€ for this server. 3TB disk is 50€ extra. So 200€ for the server per month. This is also about 200$ so 1.6¢ per user and month. This should be very manageable.

      Also it doesn’t mean the server only holds 12k users. If the server holds 20k users or more you Look at less than a Cent cost per user and month.

      They are already raising 600€ per month via Patron only so 3 months worth per month. If the server gets bigger, more people will probably give money and while it stays a kinda hobby project it should work out fine.

      But you are right with something else:
      Lemmy currently has no ability to loadbalance over multiple servers for one instance. This will become a Problem in the future, but it is being worked at.

    • Barbarian@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 年前

      Reddit is not a “simpler setup”. Reddit has gigantic amounts of computational resources to throw at things. Resources that make servers like this look like a Raspberry Pi. They’re just much less transparent about how the backend works and what they have.

  • Clutch@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 年前

    Is one donation method preferred over another? That is to say, is one cheaper than the other?

  • Cool Beance@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 年前

    For less tech-savvy newbies (like me), in case there is some confusion affecting your urge to engage/donate… My friend gave me a great explanation:

    • Lemmy the platform is planet Earth

    • “Instances” like lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc. are like the different countries on Earth

    • When someone signs up, the user picks one instance to be a part of, like how an Earthling becomes a citizen of a country

    • If you register at lemmy.world, that means your home instance/ “home country” is lemmy.world, but you can “travel” to lemmy.ml, another instance / “country”, to check out and subscribe to their community

    • When you subscribe to a different instance that’s not your home instance, you can still participate in their content, and other people will be able to see which instance / “country” you’re from

    • Each instance can have its own version of the same “subreddit”, so you can have a c/Memes in your home instance that is different from a c/Memes in another instance. But you can subscribe to both separately

    • c/[community name] is the naming convention used here I think like r/[subreddit name] on Reddit. If talking about a community in a different instance, it’s c/[community name]@[instance name] so like c/memes@lemmy.ml

    • Donations will help with the cost of running lemmy.world only and not lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, etc.

    Someone please correct any of this if any of it is wrong, I’ll happily edit

  • TheDarkBanana87@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    2 年前

    Hello, i still doesn’t quite grasp about the concept of federation and about how fediverse works.

    But does it means that one instance can only run from one server?

    Say lemmy.world running on Server A lemmy.ml running on Server B

    User can register on whichever they want and can see the post from server A and Server B

    But when Server A reach maximum capacity, can Server A scale up or distribute the load to multiple instances?

    How can we solve the issue of computing power when more and more users migrate to using this services

    Thank you 😀

    Sorry if its a dumb question, but the whole Federation concept is still new to me. I created multiple account to log in to beehaw, mastodon, lemmy.world, lemmy.ml at first because i dont know that with one user, i can see other communities from another instances

    • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      2 年前

      I’m trying to figure out why I even saw this post! I’ve never been to lemmy.world - I’m logged in to (and currently browsing) sh.itjust.works. Not sure why it’s showing me this post.

      Gonna take a while to wrap my redditor brain around this stuff!

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        4·
        2 年前

        That’s what we mean when we talk about federation!

        All the instances are interconnected (unless they block each other). You can post, vote, comment, and even become a moderator of a community on any other instance.

        In many ways, it’s all one big site. In many ways it’s also not, but to the end user who just wants to browse around, it’s not as important as people make it out to be.

        There’s some rough edges around community discovery, cross-instance linking, etc. But the devs are working hard on fixing those issues.

        • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 年前

          I understood that I would see remote (is that the right word?) communities to which I had subscribed. Am I also seeing communities to which my local users have subscribed? I don’t think I’d want that.

          • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
            2·
            2 年前

            There’s a few tabs at the top of the feed (on the site, apps might be different)

            “Local” shows all content from communities on your instance.

            “All” shows content from all communities on all instances that your instance has “discovered”. Your instance will discover a remote community once at least one member of your instance searches for it and subscribes.

            “Subscribed” shows content from communities you’ve subscribed to, both local and remote.

    • Ruud@lemmy.worldOPMEnglish
      3·
      2 年前

      Optimal would be if users would spread over many servers, instead of all coming to Lemmy.world. But most users don’t fully understand the Federation concept so they think they need to register here so they can see local content?

      I think the current server can handle a lot of users. It’s just the software that isn’t ready for it… but that will improve. If ever this server gets too small, next step would be to scale using Kubernetes, but also that requires the software to be better prepared for that.

      • TheDarkBanana87@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 年前

        Hello, after reading all the comments, I realized that I share the same questions (sort of) with the others.

        Thank you for replying and clarify things

        Cheers Ruud. And thank you 😊

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        1·
        2 年前

        You’re seeing mostly CPU bottlenecks I assume?

        What’s your RAM and storage situation looking like?

      • JoeKrogan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 年前

        Perhaps having the lemmy main site suggest servers with less load in a dynamic way would help with this. Instance xyz is now recommended on the main page due to having less users. The main problem I see with that is that there are different “themed” and what is suggested may not match up with the user’s preferences and tastes.

        Thanks for setting up and managing the instances.

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
          1·
          2 年前

          This is already the case I think. But the server must meet certain requirements, including specifically opting into being recommended.