I already get rate-limited like crazy on lemmy and there are only like 60,000 users on my instance. Is each instance really just one server or are there multiple containers running across several hosts? I’m concerned that federation will mean an inconsistent user experience. Some instances many be beefy, others will be under resourced… so the average person might think Lemmy overall is slow or error-prone.
Reddit has millions of users. How the hell is this going to scale? Does anyone have any information about Lemmy’s DB and architecture?
I found this post about Reddit’s DB from 2012. Not sure if Lemmy has a similar approach to ensure speed and reliability as the user base and traffic grows.
https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/
Wouldn’t that create a natural balance though? A large instance starts struggling so people are incentivised to move to smaller instances or start new instances and so spread the load more evenly. That’s how it would scale. I’m surprised how many of the larger instances haven’t closed signups yet but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if they did.
The issue isn’t on the user end, but the sub end since that is where all the data is stored.
So, according to your proposal, the best thing a sub should do when it is getting popular is to go private with its existing subscribers and any new people who want to participate should go create their own sub in a different instance.
I wasn’t talking about subs, I’m talking about when an instance gets too popular. Ideally you’d want lots of small instances, ideally communities should be spread evenly as well and if your users are spread out that should happen more or less naturally.
Where do you think the main costs of internet traffic and data are?