[taywrobel]

I don’t think this is off topic, because this is a common theme across all of Lemmy. Not necessarily no caching, but abysmal performance across the board.

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.

[Nexxxeh]

For me, I find Reddit also often abysmal.

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.

[londons_explore]

To be fair, load testing is hard to get right. Plenty of well resourced and smart teams screw it up, and have outages due to scaling issues.

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.

[distcs]

Exactly! And also keep in mind that all of this is open source created by volunteers like you and me in their free time. Imagine you and me working on a side project like this during weekends. We will probably be focusing on implementing the protocol right, fixing all those rendering and mundane CSS issues, making sure the login and session management does not have security holes. Essentially get all the functional stuff right. And one day Reddit makes some crazy announcement which drives hoardes of people to our little project. Pretty sure we'll not be prepared enough to deal with scaling issues due to the sudden influx of new users.

[balder1991]

Just some more info, they were working on Lemmy full time.

Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...

[littlestymaar]

Yeah, the two of them…

[shagie]

Its a matter of setting the expectation of involvement.

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.

[afavour]

All of what you’re saying is correct but so is what the OP said.

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.

[bee_rider]

Reddit is still in the process of making bad moves I think; unless I missed something and they announced a reversal of the API pricing changes?

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?

[balder1991]

I feel like the population boom was enough to enable a few communities to settle in Lemmy and now they’ll grow more organically. So far I’m enjoying the quality of posts there, it’s definitely a situation where quality over quantity makes sense.

[red-iron-pine]

honestly strikes me as a HN sorta thing where there is a small group of motivated and technically savvy types. noise-to-signal ratio is pretty good, and overt or covert 'hailcoporate' sorta stuff is not especially common.

[thatwasunusual]

> To be fair, load testing is hard to get right.

Load _testing_ is easy.

The problem is to handle load, and cache invalidation is _extremely_ hard.

[raybb]

Don't have a link now but as I understand it the main problem is they were using websockets and it didn't scale to so many users. So they're switching to rest api calls and that should fix a lot of the issues. But it's a pretty big switch they've been working hard on.

[ehutch79]

Shouldn't rest (or graphql) be the default? with realtime updates being a progressive enhancement?

[shagie]

Note that what amounts to a single page app with all the links rendered after fetching some data from a service isn't going to be something that can be indexed by a search engine.

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.

[RobotToaster]

It looks like kbin is a more traditional php program, so should be indexable?

[shagie]

Yes, except that they've blocked it for crawlers that honor that.

https://pagespeed.web.dev/analysis/http-kbin-social/ckiwikap...

> CRAWLING AND INDEXING

> Page is blocked from indexing

[ehutch79]

I'm not sure what any of that has to do with using websockets by default vs traditional rest data fetching?

[shagie]

You can cache some REST requests which would reduce the load of serving them out of the web socket request each time.

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.

[randomdata]

Choosing a random Lemmy instance, I see server rendered content and <a href> links that are followable. Searching for 'site:<instance domain>' on Google turns up plenty of results, very much identical to what I see when searching for 'site:reddit.com'. Google seems to have no trouble indexing the site.

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.

[ekanes]

> with more Reddit communities coming back from the blackout, their opportunity to claim the user base in the long run is already passed

Perhaps, but on June 30th Apollo (most likely) goes dark. So there may be another group of folks checking it out.

[minorninth]

I've experienced that too for sure, but https://lemmy.world/ has been pretty responsive for me.

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.

[londons_explore]

To be fair, load testing is hard to get right. Plenty of well resourced and smart teams screw it up, and have outages due to scaling issues.

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.

[shagie]

> unpaid developers behind Lemmy

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.

[stev-0]

Honestly, performance isn’t all that bad for me. Not much worse than Reddit anyways.

[user_named]

I just get a spinner when I try to login to lemmy but browsing works.