There is a matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-admin-support-topics:discuss.online
For Lemmy, I primarily use Photon and have contributed a little bit to the project.
Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn’t too bad (using docker)… much more straight-forward than I feared.
My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person’s profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven’t posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.
Likewise, my “#explore” tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I’ve recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts… again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.
Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It’s great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.
Twitter and Reddit may have only lost a few million users to Mastodon and Lemmy so far, but these are nation-sized numbers, comparable to what Scandinavia is to the United States of America. The incumbents have allowed the fediverse to reach critical mass. It’s only gonna get bigger, but it already works well enough that I’ve no need for any other social network. It’s nicer here.
This resonates with me. Although they are still lacking for the long tail of small niche communities, Lemmy and Mastodon now have enough people and content that I rarely find myself going to Reddit or Twitter. The fediverse is not perfect and there is a lot of room for growth, but it is now large enough to be viable and hopefully sustainable.
I think this is missing an article link: https://www.phoronix.com/review/downfall
Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Sandy Bridge is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.
Rough day for CPU makers…
Update: Of course there is a dedicated page for it: https://downfall.page/
I wonder if it is because of the various outages on both instance and the new “dead instance” detection, lemmy.ml has temporarily stopped receiving updates?
The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.
I think this is part of the recommended (external) nginx configuration for lemmy:
limit_req_zone $binary_remote_addr zone={{domain}}_ratelimit:10m rate=1r/s;
Which can be found here