On the instance I’m using, my comments and posts have disappeared. It is ok?
I had a few helpful comments here that I saved, but it’s all gone.
Having got used to the stability in Mastodon I was surprised by such things in Lemmy as:
Unable to log into your account through the app after an update on the server.
Unable to log into your account through the app if your instance version is out of date.
Just because you’ve created a post or written a comment doesn’t mean other Lemmy users will see it.
I have to constantly check to see if my messages are visible on other instances.
You also need to have many sub-accounts on different instances in case some of the primary instances are unavailable.
I have wildly more patience for Lemmy’s glitches than I do for Reddit’s. Lemmy’s devs are working on a shoestring budget with just a few people trying to prop up a whole social network. The project is still pretty early in its life cycle.
I’ve made the assessment that the growing pains are worth weathering, because Lemmy as a platform and wider community gives me much more joy than any big corpo platform I’ve ever tried.
As a developer, I am absolutely amazed that any of this (all the software you are using, all of it) even works a little. So: no.
I independently came up with “federation” (as in thought of it but not exactly this, and was building on others work) as the basis for a masters thesis in the early 2000s but left the program to get a job so never saw it through.
So, no, I am not annoyed. I am amazed, grateful, impressed, and humbled but I am not annoyed.
The app? There are many, many clients for Lemmy. Thunder is able to handle multiple versions and multiple accounts on multiple instances. This is a client API implementation limitation of whatever client you are using. Not Lemmy itself.
As for the federation issues, they are being worked out. Each major version has improved the internal server logic, improving the reliability of the inter-instance communication. But the changes have also come with kinks, that have had to be worked out with each sub-version update, before the team bites off on the next big improvement.
v19 introduced changes to how the federation queue works, and these are currently causing higher resource usage than before. Because of this, some instances seem to be falling behind on syncing federated content.
When do you think Lemmy will reach the same stability as Mastodon?
With the current tiny team, at least a year out. Probably more.
With improved functionality, adoption will likely improve, with improved adoption interest in developing it should improve… Once that feedback loop gets going things can go very fast.
The reddit migration has seeded Lemmy with a bunch of competent client apps, and developers to work on them (I’ve personally contributed to Thunder). But it didn’t do much for the development of Lemmy itself.
Mastodon has achieved critical mass among developer interest, I think, and is teetering on the edge of becoming a real mainstream option. When I first tried it many years ago, it was near unusable for the average normal person. And while it is now much better, it’s been years. Lemmy is a lot closer to the start of that same road.
Nope, even a buggy, glitchy Lemmy is a head and shoulders better experience than any shitty corpo social media.
I’m willing to put up with Lemmy’s glitches. The vast majority of admins, mods, and developers are volunteers doing what they do (largely for free) simply because they think it’s worth doing. If it were a product I paid for I would not be near as chill about it.
Lemmy was a fairly young project when everyone started piling in from Reddit. If the glitches you’re experiencing bother you that badly, perhaps consider contributing to the project, the network or your homeserver. Open source projects work best when everyone contributes what they can, when they can and as they can.
no.
its ver 0.19, how can you hold something so obviously in development to such standards?
I’ve not seen a single one of those glitches since I’ve been an active user.
I’ve had fewer errors overall than I have Reddit, but your mileage is going to vary drastically based on your instance. I’ve briefly tried other instances, even fairly popular ones, and I’d describe the experience as nearly unusable.
Maybe you should ask your admin in !meta@lemy.nl or !chat@lemy.nl what’s up with the specific errors on your instance. Maybe they had some problems operating it. You can always switch instances. My posts never disappear without reason. (They can also be removed if they violate the terms of an instance or community.)
The other issues also annoy me. Federation is somewhat broken and posts and comments often don’t propagate to other instances since Lemmy version 0.19.0 (and 0.19.1 which should have fixed that.) It’s the fault of the Lemmy developers to release a broken update. We’ll see if they continue doing that or if they have learned something. I think they want to hire a third full-time developer. Maybe that helps.
The need to re-login and unable to login with an older client happened once. Things like that can happen if bigger changes are made. I don’t think this will become a regular thing. And it’s not that annoying in my eyes. Most importantly clients have to handle that correctly and give a meaningful error message and guide you to the login page. But some proper error handling is also missing here.
So: Yes. The things you mentioned also annoy me. Lemmy has still lots of room for improvement. And it’s nowhere near other federated platforms. I hope the Lemmy devs aren’t repeating the most annoying mistakes and fix federation soon so this can be an issue of the past…
Sounds like your instance have federation issue, probably due to v0.19.0 updates. The latest version, v0.19.1, supposed to fix those federation issues. Not sure what’s the server specs of your instance, but v0.19.x has increased database ram usage compared to previous versions, so if the instance is hosted on a tiny server, the admin may need to do some tinkering to make sure the federation process doesn’t crash due to out-of-memory issue.
Unfortunately, seems like 0.19.1 didn’t fix it. I still have issues on some instances and posts. There is still something wrong with federation. Hope it gets fixed soon.
I’m annoyed by my instance basically shutting down after I was told that it really didn’t matter where I registered my Lemmy account back when I moved from Reddit.
