Obligatory shoutout to !anime@ani.social if you want a more anime-focused discussion. Of what I have watched (or seen enough of to make a judgement) there are a couple standouts. Note that I haven’t really watched much western animation in recent years.

• Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End - !frieren@ani.social
• The Apothecary Diaries
• Heavenly Delusion
• Delicious in Dungeon - !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - This one is done by Studio Trigger, so it is a bit stylized, but I adore the animation in this series
• Jujutsu Kaisen - I haven’t watched this, but I have only seen tremendous praise for season 2’s animation (despite the studio’s working conditions)
• Demon Slayer - another show I haven’t watched, but have seen plenty of gorgeous clips

Wildcard answer would be Star Wars Visions. Each episode is done by a different animation studio, so it can be up to personal preference as to which ones you like, but there are some great showcases in the show.

Edit: If you care a lot about animation quality, I would recommend checking out the SakugaBlog. It goes into deep dives on Japanese animation. For example, they did a whole running series on Frieren (link to the first article).

A lot of the anime-related communities have consolidated over time to the ani.social instance. There are historical reasons for this (largely due to hostility from the ml admins), and if you want a brief history for just the general anime community, I previously wrote a post here.

That being said, the ani.social instance has been growing with new communities being added. Here are the more active ones:

General Communities

• !anime@ani.social
• !manga@ani.social
• !lightnovels@ani.social

Series-Specific Communities

• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Delicious in Dungeon community
• !frieren@ani.social - Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End community
• !nokotan@ani.social - My Deer Friend Nokotan community (currently airing show)
• !dandadan@ani.social - Dan Da Dan community (show airs this fall)
• !dragonball@ani.social - Dragonball community

Misc.

• !vocaloid@ani.social - Very new community just started by @hisao@ani.social about vocaloids. Check it out!
• !vtubervids@ani.social - Community to discuss and share videos from and about vtubers
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community about Japanese voice actors behind the scenes

A couple fandom communities:

• !nokotan@ani.social - Currently airing show, has weekly discussion threads
• !dandadan@ani.social - Show that will be airing this fall, has threads for manga chapters
• !frieren@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months back, currently mostly fanart posts
• !dungeonmeshi@ani.social - Show that aired a couple months ago, currently mostly fanart posts
• !seiyuu@ani.social - Community to discuss Japanese anime voice actors behind the scenes and share clips

This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.

ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.

Could just simply give it a different subdomain like is currently done with photon. I have no idea how involved spinning up Alexandrite might be though.

I know this is an old thread and the problem has been resolved after the migration, but I did just want to update that the PR to address the latency sensitivity to federation was merged. I saw nutomic on matrix say that they are actively using it in production on lemmy.ml in order to test it. So, hopefully it will be part of the next lemmy version.

the last time I did a PR, it didn’t end very well

Oh no! The memories all came rushing back!

I think this might be a lemmy-ui issue rather than an ani.social issue. I don’t know a thing about css, but I think the offending bit of it is here in the lemmy-ui source.

The apps are a good point. The image does display correctly in an Android browser, but doesn’t load in any of the apps that I have installed.

So, I don’t really have a strong opinion here, but I suspect there might be issues with certain things (like gifs) due to the lack of avif motion support in iOS browsers (based on caniuse). I don’t have the means to test this though.

Happy birthday ani.social! Thanks for putting the effort into keeping the lights on as the community here has grown.

Ani.Social was supposed to be a KBin instance

That bit of serendipity worked out in your favor. My understanding is that kbin development has essentially stopped because of health issues with the dev. The mbin project has essentially taken up the reins as a successor still under active development.

Automatic moderation tools

These sound interesting, however these are admin-level tools rather than community-level. I have been saying for ages that lemmy needs more tools built in to help community moderators, but I am hopeful that they might be coming. Someday. Maybe. Hopefully? I know that sublinks is focusing a lot on this, but I haven’t heard as much from the lemmy devs.

I host an instance of lemmy I use for testing, so I took a quick look through the documentation for these tools to maybe install and play around with them, but I think these might be a step beyond what I want to put the effort into getting set up. Thanks for the work that you do on this front. I wonder how the image filtering tool is going to deal with drawn content. The false positive rate might differ a lot compared to what is typical.

most of these requests are from other instances

That makes sense. I think a lot of the large instances have centralized in the EU/Finland due to world being there to avoid the exact issues that caused you to move. Also, instance <-> instance communication is probably way more requests than instance <-> user.

I have only ever used hosting providers in the US before, so I wasn’t aware of the documentation requirements for many of the EU providers. Did you have to migrate the object storage as well or was that fine to just stick to where it is as long as the pict-rs configuration and urls all point to the right place?

I have never personally done a big migration like this for any of the services I run as I have usually just done small scale stuff that only I or some friends use. So, in the past I have often just destroyed things and rebuilt from scratch or, at most, just copy/pasted some docker volumes to a new host. It is something I have been thinking about a bit as I am now hosting more publicly facing things like the anime wiki, the image hosting frontend for the clips I post (they get saved to object storage), and @rikka@ani.social which uses an sqlite database. I found that setting up rsnapshot to do hourly snapshots of rikka’s database has actually proven very useful for debugging issues (in addition to having a backup) because I can see the history of the database that led to the current state.

It seems like the migration is working as we made it through a Wednesday with no noticeable federation delays at all. Keep up the good work!

I was wondering about traffic and the regional breakdown. I had been guessing it was mostly EU/NA based on the traffic I got to clips I post to the anime community using my own domain. Cloudflare just lists the top 5 countries:

However, I wasn’t sure if that might be influenced by the time of day I am posting them since I am on the East coast of the US. Also included in that image is how much bandwidth the cloudflare cache has saved me in the past month. Posting clips as webms means that cloudflare will cache them automatically and save me >90% of the bandwidth on my VPS (something I didn’t know to start with, but am grateful for).

Alright, I have been doing some poking around the grafana dashboard and noticed that about 20k activities/hour (~ 6 per second) seems to be the limit that ani.social can process coming in from lemmy.world. Whenever the activity peaks on world go over that (generally EU afternoon/NA morning), we start to lag a bit. Then, after the peak has subsided, we catch up.

All this really seems like it is putting a pretty hard limit on how big the fediverse could actually grow without federation becoming completely impossible. I was reading up on efforts that reddthat has undertaken to improve federation from world (since they are in AUS). Their EU-based proxy seems to have worked well, but even with batching like this, federation is always going to be a lot of bandwidth and message passing between servers that just might not scale past a certain point. Anyway, I am off topic.

In any case, the lag seems like it will be coming and going with a bit of regularity, kind of like fediverse tides.

The federation delays seem to be getting better over the past day or so. So, whatever you are doing seems to be working. It seems like the PR to engineer out a lot of the latency sensitivity of Lemmy federation is still a WIP, so this might be something that comes and goes as the network topology and routing changes day to day. Almost like federation weather.

Yeah, it’s a weird situation. I am not removing duplicates that haven’t federated over yet. Until posts federate to ani.social, no other, third-party instances see them. The situation is growing worse too. The current delay is up to ~12 hours behind.

Edit: Currently improving, back down to ~8.5 hours.

The outbound federation to lemmy.world has been resolved at this point (thanks hitagi!), but the inbound federation from lemmy.world continues to be an issue. I don’t really have any insight into solutions for that as it seems it might be due to physical constraints similar to what has been plaguing the AU/NZ servers.

Just a heads up to moderators of ani.social communities though. Because the world version of any community here is going to be a couple hours delayed (currently ~8 hours), it might make sense to have an account on world that you appoint as a mod to your community. This lets you take moderator actions on things that are in the world version of your community even before it federates over instead of having to wait hours for the spam/whatever to federate over before you can remove it.

Tagging @MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz to let you know since you probably have some of the more active communities on the instance.

Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).

I am just relaying what the world admins have been saying in matrix and here on kbin. I am hopeful that the issue can be resolved because losing kbin users would suck.