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Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their comm

Lemmy has the same discoverability and usability problems as Mastodon. Especially for non-technical users, there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. And that's assuming they can even conceptualize what the fediverse is. I'm a technical user, and I closed join-lemmy.org after ten seconds because it was too many clicks to get to an interface that looked like Reddit. I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was - did I land on the equivalent of a subreddit? Or is this a federated instance that includes all "subreddits" the server is connected to? Then I saw an intimidating user interface with sparse activity and low numbers of comments. So I concluded that if that's how I felt as a technically sophisticated user, then Lemmy doesn't stand a chance of gaining traction with the average redditor. I went back to Reddit and noticed most of the subs I like are done with their blackout. Lemmy can succeed, but it needs a usable client that abstracts away the complexity of federation and choosing which servers to join. It seems like a perfect opportunity for Apollo, RIF, and the other award winning Reddit clients that are about to shut down. Why not port their apps to point to Lemmy backend(s) instead of Reddit? They could bring their loyal userbase to Lemmy, solving the chicken-and-egg problem and helping to bootstrap activity. And they can keep their UI, solving the problem of the intimidating user interface that would otherwise inhibit adoption of Lemmy. It seems like there is a relatively straight-forward path to integration, but the opportunity window is probably closing soon. They'd need to act fast. The first step would probably be for Lemmy contributors to build an open source interopability layer that implements the Reddit API (maybe this already exists?), and for the client apps to figure out how to add one more layer of indirection to their interface ("servers").

beowulfey 3y ago
Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.
- ihateolives 3y ago
  As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170 https://beehaw.org/post/567170
  - tazjin 3y ago
    What's the reason? US culture war stuff?
    - open-paren 3y ago
      "It is too big and we can't deal with that many users".
      - omniglottal 3y ago
        Albeit indistiguishable, trolls should not be consdered equivalent to users.
    - dingusdew 3y ago
      [dead]
    - ihateolives 3y ago
      Sorry, added link with source now.
    - archargelod 3y ago
      Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary measure, until there are better moderation options.
    - mock-possum 3y ago
      dismissing the ongoing campaign for equal rights as 'US culture war stuff' is awfully heartless, don't you think?
elxr 3y ago
> there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from. All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.
bastardoperator 3y ago
Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for data, I want data presented to me.
- chongli 3y ago
  What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join multiple servers either, just one.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bastardoperator 3y ago
    I don't want to look for data and join things. I don't have to do that on reddit. Overall I would say even with blackouts, reddit is still more interesting.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption, not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink" (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to implement it, because they already have a loyal user base to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s) their users prefer. Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.
candiddevmike 3y ago
Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
  Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which can still be open source, with competing implementations that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense that each user can have one app that connects to multiple backends for fetching and posting content. And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
- jtode 3y ago
  It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve. And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!" I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise. I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better. I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.
ghusto 3y ago
Same, but thanks to some of the replies to your post it makes sense to me now. Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.
gtsteve 3y ago
Lemmy has already massively improved since I first encountered it a few years ago. There are so many more users and so much more activity. I expect the usability issues will be worked on and resolved in time. Without a corporation behind it or some way to meaningfully monetise it, process will be slow of course, and I'm not sure it could ever become mainstream in the same way that Reddit has. In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de https://browse.feddit.de However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.
- anthonypasq 3y ago
  the equivalent lemmy community i am currently most pissed about losing on reddit (/r/bjj) has 1 post and 8 users :)
ZacnyLos 3y ago
Average internet user has no idea how subreddits work.
- jtode 3y ago
  Average internet user thinks Bill Gates has a robot arm with vaccine-delivering microdart shooters and if you shake his hand you'll have Windows 11 installed directly to your nervous system.
  - isaacremuant 3y ago
    Actually. The average internet user would think himself pretty smart repeating low effort strawmen like yours while repeating heavily propagandized mantras such as "It's safe and effective" and "It's just 2 weeks! Can't you just stay put for 2 weeks?"
    - jtode 3y ago
      You're cute.
      - isaacremuant 3y ago
        0 retort to a true statement. Better than yikes.
Animats 3y ago
The front page of lemmy: Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse. Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github. It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point. USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it. Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
  - Tempat 3y ago
    I don’t know much about how the fediverse thing works. Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind of like how torrents work, with some central list of all servers acting as the “tracker list”?: - Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is - A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.
    - wccrawford 3y ago
      You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a server. Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.
omginternets 3y ago
I’ve often found myself thinking that the discoverability barrier might be an asset. It keeps the community mostly free of low-quality posters.
- jasonladuke0311 3y ago
  ^ this is why all of these Reddit/Twitter alternatives will ultimately be tiny little gardens
  - omginternets 3y ago
    Is that such a bad thing?
yadingus 3y ago
> Especially for non-technical users, Is this actually an issue? If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing? To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise. But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it. Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.
- monktastic1 3y ago
  That depends on whether you consider a community that's missing all non-technical voices to be "better." By contrast, operating systems are an individual choice with individual impact.
  - yadingus 3y ago
    That is a fair point, but as a thought experiment, I can't really say. I just think the immediate assumption that you need those non-technical voices should be reconsidered.
    - monktastic1 3y ago
      It's not really a question of need. I appreciate interacting with a diverse crowd, and I think most others do, too.
marcosdumay 3y ago
> I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit. But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community. And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being name "join" doesn't make it obvious.
drdaeman 3y ago
I'm a technical user, I've spent last 3 days trying to figure out what should I really do to make a setup that I wouldn't want to nuke in a month (or a year). I'm still at loss how to get this deployed the right way (and not a lazy "install this in 5 minutes, feel the pains forever" way, thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough). My current list of grievances: - No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon. - No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).
- paulmd 3y ago
  > thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.
  - drdaeman 3y ago
    I would've explored alternative servers. The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :) I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix. Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported). Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb, sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.
    - Arathorn 3y ago
      Solving active/backup HA for Matrix is pretty straightforward: postgres replication for the db and a shared filesystem for the media repo. When the primary postgres+synapse goes down, promote the secondary to primary, and continue. We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.

beowulfey 3y ago

Try Lemmy.world. Currently the fastest growing Lemmy server. It feels basically like any other social media site, like Hacker News or Reddit. I was using it, and seeing people post from other servers was pretty seamless and felt intuitive. Honestly, I say this all the time but I think people just need to treat federation like it's email. The difference is that the "email threads" are public to all, rather than in your inbox.

ihateolives 3y ago
As it happens, another big server, Beehaw, just defederated lemmy.world today. So drama has already begun. https://beehaw.org/post/567170 https://beehaw.org/post/567170
- tazjin 3y ago
  What's the reason? US culture war stuff?
  - open-paren 3y ago
    "It is too big and we can't deal with that many users".
    - omniglottal 3y ago
      Albeit indistiguishable, trolls should not be consdered equivalent to users.
  - dingusdew 3y ago
    [dead]
  - ihateolives 3y ago
    Sorry, added link with source now.
  - archargelod 3y ago
    Beehaw is moderated by 4 people. There was a wave of trolls from lemmy.world and one other instance, that doesn't restrict account creation. So, they decided to unfederate from those instances atleast as a temporary measure, until there are better moderation options.
  - mock-possum 3y ago
    dismissing the ongoing campaign for equal rights as 'US culture war stuff' is awfully heartless, don't you think?

elxr 3y ago

> there's too much friction required to find their communities and aggregate them into a single usable feed with a nice client. This is what old reddit did so well. You just open reddit.com and you see a dense wall of stories, along with vote count, number of comments on each story, and which subreddit that particular story came from. All in ZERO clicks. No images or graphics at all, aside from little thumbnails you can easily ignore. Minimal, dense, and clutter-free.

bastardoperator 3y ago

Exactly this. Lemmy looks like too much work if I'm being honest and none of the communities look that enticing. The reason reddit is popular is because it's easily accessible to the majority of people. I can't see a path to mass adoption here without a centralized source. I don't want to hunt for data, I want data presented to me.

chongli 3y ago
What do you mean by "too much work"? I joined both lemmy.world and lemmy.ca yesterday (just to see how federation worked) and it was very quick and seamless. No more difficult than joining Reddit. You don't need to join multiple servers either, just one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bastardoperator 3y ago
  I don't want to look for data and join things. I don't have to do that on reddit. Overall I would say even with blackouts, reddit is still more interesting.
TechBro8615 3y ago
Yep. But I do genuinely think there is a path to adoption, not with a centralized source, but a centralized "sink" (the client). The "aggregation theory" model could apply here, and the Apollo/RIF apps have a unique opportunity to implement it, because they already have a loyal user base to bootstrap activity across whichever Lemmy backend(s) their users prefer. Another feature that would help with bootstrapping would be something like a "Reddit bridge," i.e. a Lemmy instance that proxies requests to Reddit and allows you to authenticate your Reddit account so you can read it and post comments to it like any other Lemmy instance.

candiddevmike 3y ago

Or folks could learn how to do this stuff. Centralization due to "ease of use" is what got us into this mess, and keeps getting us into more walled gardens. At some point folks need to take some responsibility and learn how to setup and maintain their own shit.

TechBro8615 3y ago
Well that's what I'm saying. The backend doesn't need to be centralized. But you can avoid the need for the user to "learn this stuff" (which, like it or not, is undeniably a barrier to adoption), by "centralizing" the client (which can still be open source, with competing implementations that all connect to the same "fediverse"), in the sense that each user can have one app that connects to multiple backends for fetching and posting content. And instead of relying on servers to federate with each other (which basically just shifts the problem, replacing one centralized walled garden with a patchwork of smaller gardens), why not let the client decide which servers to subscribe to? In an ideal world, the client could even merge comment threads when the same story is posted to multiple servers that the client subscribes to.
jtode 3y ago
It's endlessly fascinating to me - I basically assume that everyone here knows how to do computer stuff, at least at the enthusiast/power user level. Nobody at that level should have an issue with a system that requires a bit of extra configuration or a really, really tiny learning curve. And yet, every single one of these fediverse discussions is full of people basically saying "This doesn't spoonfeed me with zero effort, I turned it off after ten seconds!" I have had my Mastodon account since 2017, I posted once and then never really looked again, and then after Twitter imploded and people started using it, I came back. I was an active Twitter user at the time as well, and I just stuck with it for a while, but eventually I just quit using it because there was just no quality interaction on it at all, with people I agree with or otherwise. I also had kind of a boring Masto feed at first, until I figured out to subscribe to hashtags, and now I have several quality conversations a day about things I'm interested in, with congenial strangers who are also just there to talk about cool stuff. You have to change your habits a bit, it's fine and it's better. I have also identified a strong tendency in this forum to do very well-outlined explanations of what is difficult or inefficient about federation, but invariably, the problem they're describing exists in a much worse form on the silo'd alternative they are implying we should stick with.

ghusto 3y ago

Same, but thanks to some of the replies to your post it makes sense to me now. Thing is I _still_ closed the tab and will likely forget about it. Turns out that thousands of people posting nothing but complaints about "REDDIT EVIL", isn't that interesting to read.

gtsteve 3y ago

Lemmy has already massively improved since I first encountered it a few years ago. There are so many more users and so much more activity. I expect the usability issues will be worked on and resolved in time. Without a corporation behind it or some way to meaningfully monetise it, process will be slow of course, and I'm not sure it could ever become mainstream in the same way that Reddit has. In terms of discovery, there is a centralised community browser of sorts... but you'll see it's got quite a way to go: https://browse.feddit.de https://browse.feddit.de However, as someone willing to put the time in to learn something new I've found my efforts rewarded. It does take longer than 10 seconds to get used to Lemmy and the fediverse, but I'd say no longer than 15-20 minutes really. I enjoy being part of something new and I hope it lasts. Perhaps it won't hang on to many of the new users it has gained, but I expect this won't be the last time Reddit does something its users don't like and next time around more will stick, hopefully presenting a very good alternative.

anthonypasq 3y ago
the equivalent lemmy community i am currently most pissed about losing on reddit (/r/bjj) has 1 post and 8 users :)

ZacnyLos 3y ago

Average internet user has no idea how subreddits work.

jtode 3y ago
Average internet user thinks Bill Gates has a robot arm with vaccine-delivering microdart shooters and if you shake his hand you'll have Windows 11 installed directly to your nervous system.
- isaacremuant 3y ago
  Actually. The average internet user would think himself pretty smart repeating low effort strawmen like yours while repeating heavily propagandized mantras such as "It's safe and effective" and "It's just 2 weeks! Can't you just stay put for 2 weeks?"
  - jtode 3y ago
    You're cute.
    - isaacremuant 3y ago
      0 retort to a true statement. Better than yikes.

Animats 3y ago

The front page of lemmy: Lemmy - A link aggregator for the fediverse. Join a Server - Run a Server - Follow communities anywhere in the world Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github. It suffers from the same problem as Mastodon - "Join a server". But which one? These federated things need to be set up so that there's "no wrong door". Enter anywhere, see the same stuff regardless of where it's hosted. Discovery and hosting may be distributed behind the scenes, but they have to have a unified user entry point. USENET had that problem solved. It was federated, but it didn't look federated to the end user.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> No, no. You lead with the benefits to the user. This isn't Github Seriously. Have a default server (or set of defaults) newbies dump into after completing a simple sign-up flow. Then let them move it as they benefit from the product and gain an incentive to learn about it. Reddit is up in arms about API pricing and mods. Do you think the average Reddit user would have signed up if they had to first jump through hoops to prove their respect for community-based architecture? No! An infintessimal fraction of users care about philosophy or architecture, even when those values and decisions directly cause effects they follow. Users came for their cat pics. Give them their cat pics. Pitch them on the back end afterwards.
- Tempat 3y ago
  I don’t know much about how the fediverse thing works. Would it be theoretically possible to have something kind of like how torrents work, with some central list of all servers acting as the “tracker list”?: - Servers choose what they want to host and what their personal bandwidth limit is - A user visiting a specific subforum automatically downloads from whatever servers are currently available to serve it Then you’d never have to manually choose a server.
  - wccrawford 3y ago
    You don't have an identity on a torrent unless you join a server. Similarly, you need to join a Lemmy server to have an identity there, or anywhere on Lemmy. Unlike private torrent trackers, you only need 1 Lemmy identity, and you can subscribe to other servers' communities from your original server.

omginternets 3y ago

I’ve often found myself thinking that the discoverability barrier might be an asset. It keeps the community mostly free of low-quality posters.

jasonladuke0311 3y ago
^ this is why all of these Reddit/Twitter alternatives will ultimately be tiny little gardens
- omginternets 3y ago
  Is that such a bad thing?

yadingus 3y ago

> Especially for non-technical users, Is this actually an issue? If you're looking for a straight up reddit alternative in all its scope, I can see it being an issue, but if we simply want a better iteration, then isn't one more catered to technical users, perhaps be a good thing? To me this feels similar to windows vs linux. The pains you describe in learning to use lemmy reminds me of windows users who complain about linux not being exactly like windows, UI wise. But for users like me, after having un-learned windows and customized my linux experience, the result is just downright better from any angle. Yes, it was a time investment learning the ropes, but it was worth it. Perhaps the modern approach is to stop trying to be like the most populist standard, and embrace platforms that are midway between the social giants and obscure niches.

monktastic1 3y ago
That depends on whether you consider a community that's missing all non-technical voices to be "better." By contrast, operating systems are an individual choice with individual impact.
- yadingus 3y ago
  That is a fair point, but as a thought experiment, I can't really say. I just think the immediate assumption that you need those non-technical voices should be reconsidered.
  - monktastic1 3y ago
    It's not really a question of need. I appreciate interacting with a diverse crowd, and I think most others do, too.

marcosdumay 3y ago

> I did manage to find a community by clicking "join," and arbitrarily picking one of the communities on the page (which were presented in random order on every page load). I was disoriented and didn't know what this community was Well, to be honest, that part does sound exactly like reddit. But people fall on reddit by links to a public page somewhere, avoiding the empty page problem. After a short time on their site, I still don't know if I can link to a comment in Lemmy or if I can browse a community. And edit: yes, each one of those servers has a web interface at their root that you can browse and link to. The link being name "join" doesn't make it obvious.

drdaeman 3y ago

I'm a technical user, I've spent last 3 days trying to figure out what should I really do to make a setup that I wouldn't want to nuke in a month (or a year). I'm still at loss how to get this deployed the right way (and not a lazy "install this in 5 minutes, feel the pains forever" way, thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough). My current list of grievances: - No standards of any kind on sharing the same identity, e.g. between Lemmy and Mastodon. - No support for any distributed multi-master database (I'm currently trying to see if I can hack Lemmy to work with CockroachDB, but I'm probably going to give up).

paulmd 3y ago
> thanks, my Matrix Synapse server is bad enough OT but what pains did you experience with matrix / what would you have done differently? this'd make a good blog post/HN article at this moment imo.
- drdaeman 3y ago
  I would've explored alternative servers. The issue with Synapse is the same as I currently have with Lemmy - lack of HA. One particular machine goes down and the system is 100% unavailable. And most of my machines are hardware I own, located at homes (mine, parents, etc) in different countries, so they're slightly more prone to random power or uplink outages than AWS' us-east-1. Hobbyist-grade geo-distributed cluster, hah :) I've solved this for my email (two mailhosts on different continents, Dovecot dsync replication for mailboxes) and my storage (Minio works, and I'm slowly experimenting with Tahoe-LAFS), but I haven't solved it for Matrix. Dendrite supports distributed deployments and reportedly works with CockroachDB (albeit not officially supported). Not sure what Conduit supports (last time I've checked it was all about embedded databases like sqlite, rocksdb, sled and persy), but it has pluggable database backend architecture so when I'll finally decide I want to fix my stuff, I'd certainly check it out as well.
  - Arathorn 3y ago
    Solving active/backup HA for Matrix is pretty straightforward: postgres replication for the db and a shared filesystem for the media repo. When the primary postgres+synapse goes down, promote the secondary to primary, and continue. We’re also working on account portability (MSC4014) that would eventually support active/active at the matrix layer, but it’s not ready tet.