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/
The way i see it the best way forward would be each community runs there own instance and what we now call communities should become subtopics of that community.
So for example. Asklemmy could be an instance and its members are all people who believe in the value of that instance and want to be involved in sustaining it.
Explainlikeiam5 could be a subcommunities of this instance because its philosophy is largely the same. If asklemmy has plenty of scientist members they could open a askscience subcommunity too.
The majority of user traffic would all come from other smaller homerun instances.
Big instances that try to be everything at once are a side effect of the massive growth we are experiencing, they work now but will slowly become more centralized and are therefore doomed to fail (in my opinion)
To recalculate. How can we help Lemmy grow? By being proactive users that maintain something small we chose to care about.