Due the recent high amount of users coming over from Reddit, many of the existing large Lemmy instances have been struggling to keep up. This instance was created to help spread out the load on the Lemmy network. Lemmy newbies are welcome here.
The goal for lemm.ee is to provide a home Lemmy instance for anybody that needs one. That means that you are more than welcome here even if you mostly intend to just interact with other instances rather than this one!
Note: if you want to start up a new community here, but the name is already taken by an inactive community, then don't worry! Inactive communities can be transferred to new moderators. Please follow the steps outlined in our FAQ under the "How can I take over an inactive community" section.
What is Lemmy?
Lemmy is a federated link aggregator. This image explains it pretty well! In general, the fact that it's "federated" just means that it works much like e-mail - in the same way as a Gmail user can send e-mails to iCloud Mail users or Outlook users, a lemm.ee user is able to participate in communities on many different Lemmy instances. Regardless of which Lemmy instance your account lives on, you are a part of the federated network and can interact with other users from other instances, so this instance is as good of a place as any other to get started with Lemmy.
If you have any further questions about Lemmy, please check out our guide/FAQ!
lemm.ee is intended to be a serious long-term instance, not just some random experiment.
You can always find the most up to date rules and general info about lemm.ee in the sidebar on our front page. If you want to know more about how this instance is run, you can check our administration and federation policy.
For some technical background, this instance is operated following industry best practices:
Our infrastructure is robust and has been built up with redundancy and recoverability in mind
The servers are running in the cloud (this is not some bedroom server situation!)
All of the infrastructure is described declaratively as code, which allows relatively quick and safe changes to any part of our infrastructure whenever necessary
Our entire database is backed up constantly, so in the worst case, we can always restore our data
A significant chunk of funding for this infrastructure comes directly from our amazing community. This support is essential to help secure our future. These supporters deserve the gratitude of all lemm.ee users!
Is "Hot" sort working? It doesn't seem to have updated in the past 12 hours or so... I don't know how the sorting options here work but yesterday Hot sort gave me much newer posts
Edit: seems to only be All/Hot... Id imagine some sort of federation shenanigans
Thanks for the report! I looked into this, it is mitigated for now and hot should be fresh again, but I need to invgestigate it more to figure out why it stopped updating in the first place and what a proper long-term fix would be.
For some context: Lemmy has a background process for constantly updating "hot", and this process seems to have just stealthily stopped working around 12 hours ago. I am going to do some debugging and see if I can't find the root cause, hopefully that way I'll be able to prevent it from happening again.
Might these deadlocked processes also be responsible for why the Communities (All) list seems so out of date, and why certain communities aren't showing all the comments against posts, etc. when you browse them on lemm.ee?
e.g. compare Communities listing on lemm.ee to lemm.ml. Lemm.ml shows lots of communities with thousands of members, and makes Lemmy seem like a vibrant community with tons of users.
For example, if you search for "security", you just see 3 cybersecurity communities, including [email protected] with 7 subscribers. Do the same earch on lemmy.ml and you see many more communities, including [email protected], but now showing several thousand members.
Or is this just my misunderstanding of how those things are supposed to work? Do those communities/and thread comments only update if a local lemm.ee-registered user has subscribed? i.e. a limitation of Lemmy rather than something out of sync on lemm.ee specifically...? Shame if so, because it makes it pretty useless for finding communities to subscribe to without browsing other instances.
Do those communities/and thread comments only update if a local lemm.ee-registered user has subscribed?
Yes, for now, Lemmy is designed to only sync communities with at least one local subscriber. However, this is something that is quite likely to improve in future versions of Lemmy! It's also something that I am personally interested in improving, so I will most likely attempt to tackle this in some future contributions to Lemmy code.
For example, if you search for “security”, you just see 3 cybersecurity communities, including [email protected] with 7 subscribers. Do the same earch on lemmy.ml and you see many more communities, including [email protected], but now showing several thousand members.
With lemmy.ml specifically, there's also the additional issue of them being super overloaded, so their communities are not syncing properly all the time. This is something that can be improved as people spread out to more instances, as they upgrade their servers, and as Lemmy itself is optimized.
Shame if so, because it makes it pretty useless for finding communities to subscribe to without browsing other instances.
There are currently three mains ways I would recommend finding communities (copied from our local Lemme guide and F.A.Q.):
You can browse the list of all communities here - but as mentioned above, this will only show external communities with at least one subscriber
You can check for ads for interesting communities in [email protected]
I realise it's still early days for lemmy and the influx of new users like me will be stressing the system in new ways (as well as bugging maintainers like yourself with questions!). I have some free time atm so hope to get to grips with the lemmy code too and see where I might be able to contribute.
It seems to me that there are a bunch of issues like this that, while not major issues by themselves, all conspire to drive users to more populated servers rather than spread out more evenly across instances (especially when you're unfamiliar with the platform). It would be great if servers could get a more consistent view of the fediverse, so users don't feel at a disadvantage or isolated by joining a smaller instance. I will have to take a look at ActivityPub and lemmy under the hood before I can meaningfully contribute.
Thanks again for your reply, and for your hard work maintaining lemm.ee!