Every time it’s brought up and I click into it I’m met with minute(s) long loading screens. Surely they aren’t pulling all of these stats from every node every single page load right?
As much as I want the project to succeed it’s unusable currently, and with more Reddit communities coming back from the blackout, their opportunity to claim the user base in the long run is already passed.
The stats over the last month are impressive (if you can get them to load), but it’s going to be a flash in the pan if they can’t make the website function, and I fear the ship has already left the dock.
Their performance has always been hit and more often miss. I was a fairly heavy user, a lot less now. From the hilariously shite search results, to their alien equivalent of the fail whale showing up a few times a month at least. Sometimes a refresh resolves, sometimes doing something else and then coming back later resolves it.
Don't get me started on the new UI, or how the old less awful UI loves to drag me back into the new extra shit one.
I don't know if I'm being more demanding, or extra pissy, or what. Is this not most people's experience of Reddit?
And they've had millions of dollars and nearly two decades to unfuck it. I still remember the /r/bestof post (linking to /r/askreddit) that taught us "502, it went through; 504, try once more." because commenting was occasionally a total dice roll and the error messages were obtuse.
If I have to eat some lag in the early days of Lemmy or wherever, so be it. I'm fed up with Reddit's shit, I'll try someone else's.
And the team behind Lemmy didn't exactly get much notice either, so they might not have even tried to get stuff to scale well.
Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...
This isn't two people working on it on the weekend as a hobby project that got too much attention during an unforeseen event.
Rather, it is two people who worked on it as a full time job (no other sources of income) from grants for three years (with funding running out this year).
For a rough estimate, one would expect about 10,000 hours have been put into the project (2 people, 2000 hours a year, 2.5 years).
It is less of a hobby project than Minecraft was in 2012.
It’s very difficult for a volunteer run operation to scale up at short notice. The same time Lemmy has to if it wants to capture disaffected Reddit users.
Lemmy should grow at a sustainable pace. The population boom from the blackouts is transient. As the moderators on Reddit get less enthusiastic about doing free work for a company that clearly doesn’t like them and will happily take away their tools, some will give up. The communities there will get less well taken care of, eventually users will notice, and there should be a slow trickle out. That’s the sustainable stream Lemmy should try to capture.
Or none of this will happen and Reddit will go back to normal, in which case fine, who cares, right?
Load _testing_ is easy.
The problem is to handle load, and cache invalidation is _extremely_ hard.
A google search for site:lemmy.ml with it rendered this way will never result in any data.
This may or may not be a good thing since it isn't necessarily assured that the data is stored for extended periods of time (compare: https://masto.host/mastodon-content-retention-settings/ ).
Part of the value that people have ascribed to Reddit is being able to do searches for a product review and limit it to just pages served by reddit. Lemmy appears to be ephemeral and not searchable.
Discussing the current Star Trek SNW episode may be ok, but reading a discussion from a few years ago about Emissary on DS9 ( https://www.google.com/search?q=deep+space+nine+emissary+sit... ) is something that isn't going to be doable.
https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/http-kbin-social/ckiwikap...
> CRAWLING AND INDEXING
> Page is blocked from indexing
More importantly though (with either of these) is that when Google looks at the page, there are no links for it to traverse or index.
This also means that the site/community isn't discoverable from a random person searching for it inhibiting organic growth.
For example, if you do https://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=where+to+discuss+star... it will likely never return a link to Lemmy (it may return pages that link to lemmy - like the reddit page), but not lemmy itself.
I expect you won't see results on Google, save for when you explicitly ask for the site, because there isn't much in the way of reputation. You are highly unlikely to see my personal blog, which is just plain old boring as it gets HTML, come up in search results for the same reason.
Perhaps, but on June 30th Apollo (most likely) goes dark. So there may be another group of folks checking it out.
Keep in mind this is a little different than other social networks - there isn't a single centralized server so if you hit the software on a server that's underpowered or not configured properly, you'll get a very different experience.
And the handful of unpaid developers behind Lemmy didn't exactly get much notice either, so they might not have even tried to get stuff to scale well.
They're paid, though they're having trouble scaling to the support issues.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...
> ...
> For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgentlyfixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won’t receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.
(But there are no minutes loading screens. Some 10s happen, not minutes aren't happening.)