It seems like they are down for a longer time now. How will they recover? Does longer down mean they will have to do more catching up with other instances? Can I get updates somewhere?

  • @danAEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    There needs to be ONE site, Lemmy.com, that people goto. This entire thing about having .whateveryouwant is VERY off putting.

    The main feature of a federated system is that there’s no one “owner” of the entire system; each admin uses their own servers and their own domain names. There’s nothing stopping a server admin from using a .com domain name…

    There’s no 2fa at all

    There’s basic TOTP 2FA now: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2363 but it hasn’t been released yet (it’s only available in the latest server beta). “Next-gen” TOTP (Webauthn/FIDO) is coming later: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3059

    ‘Where is my username and password actually stored?’. The answer, sadly, is wherever the dude who’s running the instance/server is. In the ‘Fediverse’ your server instance might be hosted in a US or EU data center with proper digital and physical security, or it could be Joe Blows basement in Iowa running off a NAS.

    You should get to know your server admin, then. You have the freedom to pick any server you like :)

    There simply is no content

    Have you subscribed to many communities yet? You can browse other Lemmy servers to find interesting communities, and subscribe to them on your instance.

    • promitheasEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      On a similar note, would it be possible to have something like “sharding” where one server has multiple synched copies on several people’s machines? So lets say if one machine goes down for whatever reason there are others to still serve content? This could also help with distributing load across multiple machines so its less stressful on one, and we don’t have situations such as whats going on with lemmy.ml now, where so many users are joining it that its frequently down and subscription statuses are stuck on pending

      • @danAEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        This is usually referred to as “high availability”, where you’d have a hot failover to swap to in case the main server goes down. This is usually implemented with a load balancer that checks if the upstream server is alive before sending requests to it. If the upstream server isn’t responding, switch to the other one.

        A load balancer could also spread the load evenly across multiple machines, at least for reads. Generally there’s far more reads than writes, and reads are more easily scalable since you can have database replicas that just need to sync in one direction.

        I don’t think Lemmy supports any of this yet though.

        The other approach is to split the large instances into multiple smaller instances. For Fediverse stuff, I don’t know which approach is considered “better”.