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/

  • Iron Lynx
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    151 year ago

    My expectation, or at least hope, is that Lemmy will grow horizontally, i.e. more instances for more specialised content, instead of vertically, i.e. more communities in singular, larger instances. Since it’s all federated, you can get to stuff in other instances.

    I just had an idea. Let’s compare reddit and lemmy as land use metaphors.

    Reddit is like one monolithic megacity. It’s full of communites, some big, encompassing entire neighbourhoods, and others smaller, having one street, one block, maybe even just one building.

    Lemmy is like a country, with every instance a city. Some cities are big and varied, others are smaller and specialised, like ones dedicated entirely to fishing or aviation or being German. And you can choose a city to settle in and move between cities for your content. Some cities will be more open to sharing content with residents of other cities, and others will put up bigger restrictions. There are jokes about parts of the userbase on 4chan or Tumblr forming their own subcommunities, and the fediverse allows this in a very material way.

    My expectation is that more cities may emerge as people develop more specialised communities. And since there are many cities, there is some resilience in the system. If an instance goes down, you’ve lost one instance. Out of christ knows how many. Chances are some of its content is duplicated across other instances, so nothing of value is lost. Meanwhile, if (/when) Reddit goes down, all of Reddit is gone.

    In short, I hope lemmy develops more, smaller, specialised instances over time. Reddit allowed very niche insterests to have a corner, and despite that, I think the fediverse is more suited to allow for that than a centralised service.