How can lemmy handle 5k+ signups per hour on Monday?

3 years ago by BikerJared to c/reddit

When reddit goes dark on Monday, there will be a horde of people looking for an alternative. When the APIs go dark at the end of the month, another horde will come. When /u/spez says just about anything, it'll happen again. What can we do to prep here for that? How can we attract good moderators to moderate communities here?

Just listing things I noticed from the twitter/mastodon migration:

Mastodon had a few thousand signups per hour during the peak times.
Having a single instance (or even a small number) really simplifies the signup process. How can we scale lemmy.ml and other big instances now to prep for Monday?
I'm seeing communities already pop up (/c/earthporn, /c/photography and my favorite /c/jeep). If we can keep content flowing through some of the big communities, it'll help people come back on Tuesday. (On a Sunday night at 7pm MDT, the backend on lemmy.ml is getting crushed and posting is haphazardly working for me...)
A good intro doc would help folks get up to speed faster (this is how lemmy/fediverse works, he's a list of mobile apps you can use, here's how to sign up on patreon... etc).

Scaling lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, and lemmy.one (those are the ones mentioned in the pinned post for "joining") is probably the biggest priority. If owners of these instances need money to pay for server fees, expertise with server migrations, deployments, scaling, dev work, etc, they really need to communicate.

The proverbial "call to arms" would be appropriate.

We've got lots of super nerdy folks here that can donate time/money. Personally, I'm not sure how I can help right now. (Currently subbed on Patreon, but that's it).

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tebicat 30 points 3 years ago

i don't think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

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Mjb 20 points 3 years ago

Lemmy's current approach to finding off-instance communities is a UX nightmare.

To the average, non-techy user pasting !<community>@<instance_url> to get No results despite knowing that community exists is... Offputting. Lemmy should not be showing No results while waiting to federate content, and it should be health-checking a search term before returning anything. A single request to <instance_url>/c/<community> would reveal it exists, and prevent this terrible No results response entirely.

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phil_m 5 points 3 years ago

Yeah totally, the federated features and especially the search could be streamlined quite a bit. I think this should be a top priority currently (to avoid centralization of the instances).

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ram 13 points 3 years ago

This is the main problem the fediverse experiences across the board. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to require a basic level of comprehension to sign up though. Inconvenient, sure, but if this is just the nature of the thing, it's still better than being owned by venture capital.

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pineapple 7 points 3 years ago

i don’t think we need bigger instances, i think we need more instances, and a better, streamlined process for finding instances

For one thing, it might be nice if individual instances could assign tags or categories, and if pages like join-lemmy.org/instances could allow users to browse the list of instances with a given tag. Then prospective users could choose a tag that best represents their interests, and have an easy list of instances related to that tag.

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dessalines 6 points 3 years ago

Both us lemmy devs agree with you, we want a distributed network, not a single centralized service, that could potentially suffer all the same problems as reddit.

Plus its just more work for all us server admins.

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