I have been using Lemmy for 20 days, at first I opened an account at Lemmy.world because you can join without writing a text and waiting approval. I have been enjoying the experience overall but despite the admin teans best efforts Lemmy.world has been experiencing some serious performance issues. If you want to avoid that join a smaller instance, preferably hosted in your country. I joined discuss.tchncs.de today and everything is so much faster it has added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too. It will improve not only your but all other Lemmy.world users experience too.
All fine and dandy, but don’t just pick a random one close to you. Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info. So do your due diligence and make sure to check you agree with all their policies etc.
Yeah! of course when I say a small instance, I don’t mean a random instance with 10 users. You should check it out before you join. There is a lot of great instances with ~1000 users. Maybe should add it to the post.
Don’t forget that the admin basically has all your info
What info? Lemmy is a public forum - anyone can see anything you post. Many Lemmy instances don’t even require an email address to sign up.
The biggest issue is that you’re giving them your email address and then posting info online. If you use your main email and then post something inappropriate or private, someone could easily leak that info. Someone who posts nudes without their face for example. A malicious admin could easily try to blackmail you with that info. Is it going to happen? Probably not, but why risk it?
You don’t need to provide an email address to sign up at most of the big instances. I think lemmy.world is the exception. Even your instance lemmy.ca does not require an email address.
If you really want to provide one, you could use a service that does email forwarding. Some examples are https://simplelogin.io (owned by Proton Mail), and Firefox Relay (Owned by Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser). These both have free tiers. There is also https://duckduckgo.com/email/ from the people who make the privacy focused search engine DuckDuckGo. That one I believe gives you unlimited new randomised email addresses for free. Very low attachment size limit but great for something like Lemmy.
You’re right that you don’t have to on most large instances, and that you can make burner email accounts if you have to.
But this post was simply about telling people to be careful of smaller, less known instances. The links you provided are excellent ways to protect yourself, even outside of Lemmy.
Like if you are ginger or not
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy) and browsing habits. Whether they take the steps to log those in a usable format and do something with it? I wouldn’t say the risk is much different on an instance with 1000 users vs 100.
My main concern would be instance longevity.
At the very least they would get access to your IP address (assuming you aren’t ok a VPN/proxy)
A public IP address is (by definition) public. If you’re behind CG-NAT you don’t get your own public IP and if you have a public IP but not a static one then restarting your router will change it. I don’t think there are many cases where an instance knowing your public IP is an issue. Lemmy instances hotlink media from other instances so many different instances get your IP just from browsing Lemmy.
My main concern would be instance longevity
This is a different conversation but if your account is meaningful then this should be a real concern. A month ago there were about 80 instances, now there are nearly 1000. How many of those will still exist in a year?
Close to you? I’m running my own instance in France and I live in Australia. It works great. The problem is overloaded instances.
Close to you helps in general, it’s not Lemmy specific. Though the Lemmy web ui caches stuff heavily so it might not be that much of a concern.
Yeah being overloaded is definitely the biggest factor but servers being close also helps especially when you have a slow Internet connection. That is why I added bring close part as “preferably”
So if I host my instance but subscribe to communities on lemmy.world do I actually lessen the load on lemmy.world because it only has to deal with the API calls from my instance instead of having to serve me a full fat UI? (damn that was a long sentence!)
Y’all are welcome over at thegarden.land we have a “growing” community
I’m having trouble understanding how this works. If i create a community on a different instance, why can’t i find it here, even when i have the switch set to all? Do they only sync on certain times of the day? Also when i delete a community (that i created by accident) why does it not disappear?
Federation happens gradually and changes are usually not visible everywhere at the same time. Using a fully qualified name (or an URL like
https://lemmy.world/c/community@instance) you should be able to access your new community though.
added benefit of being able to see beehaw.org posts too
Can you elaborate?
Beehaw.org chose to defederate some big instances like lemmy.world because the beehaw admins feel like they can’t moderate the inappropriate content entering their instance from big instances without proper mod tools.
They made a long post sharing their reasons but I can’t find it at the moment.
Great advice. One thing to look out for is the language settings under the profile on that instance though. I also signed up to a new instance and my feed seemed less populated and more outdated. I noticed that the languages that I read were not checked in the profile. Once I changed this the experience was significantly better.
How can I see if an instance is hosted in my country?
Was here thinking, couldn’t I host my own instance for my own usage?
Oh, absolutely. I think that’s the ideal state, everybody hosting their own local instance for a couple hundred people, all indexed with everyone else. Long way to go before we get there though.
I know this may not be popular but I may only host to myself. I have a VPS for my personal website and other projects that has some free processing power available (its a Hetzner ARM VPS, the cheapest), so I also need to figure out if Lemmy runs on ARM SoCs. I figure it must run since some people may try to run it on RPIs.
From what I understand about Lemmy, the only way to disable signups completely is by defederating. Meaning, you would not be able to view other communities from other Lemmy instances like .world or beehaw.
To get around this, you can switch to application signup like beehaw and just ignore/reject every application but this would also mean that anyone can view your instance as a guest. Like you can go to lemmy.world and view posts and comments without logging in
Atleast, that’s what I understand. Maybe someone can correct me if I’m wrong.
You can’t disable registrations from what I’m understanding but you can make them pending some approval. So in my case I’d just ignore any registration done.
It’s absolutely your right to do so
this post made me move instances and i am glad that i did, thanks!
Page loads are snappy and lightning fast at laguna.chat :). Open signups and open for new communities. Hosted in Germany and GDPR ready. https://laguna.chat
In what way is it more GDPR ready than other instances? I assume it uses the same server software?
By having an actual policy. That lists the usage of data, 3rd parties and the responsibilities of the instance owner.
Won’t you see limited posts?
Not if they’re federated to the larger instances, which they are by default. I think maybe you need to search an instance to start if no one from your instance has searched for the other instance yet, but idk, don’t quote me on that
move to a smaller instance that is hosted close to you.
How do I know the distance from an instance to me?
Check this out https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Can resolve the ip of the instance, then use an ip locator to get a rough distance
I host a small instance in the US. I think the data center is in New Jersey.
You’ll have to verify your email (I only have that on because we lost captcha support with 0.18, I’ll turn it off next update. Feel free to use a burner email if you want)
