Welcome Lemmy.world!

June 19, 2023

Extending the .world

As some may know, I run several other Fediverse instances next to mastodon.world.

When I decided it was time to also run a Calckey server, I chose the domain calckey.world, and started thinking about expanding the .world.

Lemmy

So when I wanted to start a Lemmy server, first thing I did was check if lemmy.world was available. And it was!

So I started installing Lemmy on it, and while I was doing this, I read a post about Reddit charging app developers millions for their API use. Speaking about timing... By the time the server was finished and operational (June 1st), it was announced that Reddit would see some subreddits go dark on June 12th.

So, with this announcement, people started fleeing Reddit, and looking for Lemmy servers to join. I started using a VPS (virtual cloud server) for Lemmy, with 2 CPU and 4GB RAM. Soon after opening, that appeared not to be enough, so I doubled it. And after a few thousands of users, I had to double it again, to 8 CPU and 16 GB RAM.

This really remembered me of Mastodon in November. The larger servers were struggling with the load, causing people to choose my server to create an account. Also, there aren't real 'generic' large servers. The largest server lemmy.ml states it's for 'privacy and FOSS enthusiasts'. So the .world grew fast..

I had put the links to the mastodon.world Opencollective and mastodon.world Patreon on the Lemmy site as well, because I don't want to have multiple of those. Also I started paying for the Lemmy cloud servers from the mastodon.world funds. Soon, new subscribers to these donation platforms started coming in. And even so much, that I decided to do the same for Lemmy as I did for mastodon.world: buy a ridiculously large server.

The current VPS couldn't be resized that much anymore, and load was going up with all the new users. So I bought the same server at Hetzner: a 32-core/64 thread 128GB RAM dedicated server. (For Mastodon, I doubled the RAM. For Lemmy I don't think it's needed yet.) I migrated the Lemmy software and database there, and moved over. This took 4 minutes of downtime.

After that, the server is performing very smoothly.We're over 33k users now, having the second largest Lemmy server there is. (See here for stats).

Biggest challenge now is the moderation; I see that there's more unwanted content than on Mastodon, and the moderation tools are very basic, or even lacking. But we're working on getting this organised!