Poorly. Lemmy will scale poorly.

I won’t be surprised if the larger instances start locking down more as a way to sustain themselves, like restricting communities or only allowing text posts.

Bigger instances will indeed run multiple copies of the various components, it’s pretty standard software in that regard.

Usually at first that will start by moving the PostgreSQL database to its own dedicated box, and then start adding additional backend boxes, possibly adding more caching in front so that the backend doesn’t have to do as much work. Once the database is pegged, the next step is usually a write primary and one or more read secondaries. When that gets too much, you get into sharding so that you can spread the database load across multiple servers. I don’t know much about PostgreSQL but I have to assume it’s better than MySQL in that regard and I’ve seen a 1 TB MySQL database in the wild running just fine.

I think lemmy.world in general is hitting some scalability issues that they’re working on. Keep in mind the software is fairly new and is just being truely tested at large scale, there’s probably a ton of room for optimization. Also lemmy.world is still on 0.17 and apparently 0.18 changed the protocol a lot in a way that makes it scale much better, so when they complete that upgrade it’ll probably run a lot better already.

The part that worries me about scalability in the long term is the push nature of ActivityPub. My server is already getting several POST requests to /inbox per second already, which makes me wonder how that’s gonna work if big instances have to push content updates to thousands of lemmy instances where most of the data probably isn’t even seen. I was surprised it was a push system and not a pull system, as pull is much easier to scale and cache at the CDN level, and can be fetched on demand for people that only checks lemmy once in a while.

I need to start digging into Lemmy’s code and get familiar with the internals, still only a couple days in with my private instance.

As far as I’m aware lemmy does not support load balancing or high availability as it currently stands. But development is still in its infancy and I’m sure that’s a top priority

It’s a challenge, for sure. It is known that there are some inefficiencies in the codebase, which are actively being worked on. But besides that, it’s tricky to know where bottlenecks are until the user influx happens, particularly with the novel federation architecture. Maybe it’s impossible to scale, maybe not, but we only now are seeing a testable use case. I would expect optimization work to start bearing fruit, but these thing take time.

Education probably. Back in the day people didn’t have any problem understanding that different forums had different capabilities. When MMOs were in full swing, people didn’t have problems understanding what being on thr popular server during peak hours meant.

Everyone has just gotten too used to centralization with a lot of money behind it. Eventually people will adjust their expectations. Even if Meta’s fediverse attempt takes off, there are always going to be niche communities that exist outside of those spheres, so if people want that, they’ll have to move.

The point of the fediverse is having a choice. Some people are going to chose megacorp of the week’s offering and that’s okay as long a little pockets exist for when people get mad at the megacorp. Also federation leaves space for multiple dominant platforms in a way the current system doesn’t.

In short, eventually some instances are going to be bankrolled either through a robust crowdcourcing effort or through being a company. That’s okay. The purpose of the fediverse is to allow for smaller niche ideas to be able to breathe without having to adhere to one group’s ideals. “If you don’t like it, make your own” is a fair statement now

Well, I run an instance, too. It’s not big at all, but I was thinking about the issue of scaling, too. You can only scale up a single server so much…

But on the other hand, Lemmy is still young. We’ll find solutions to that problem.

Also, interesting article. I only took a glance at it, but having only two tables kind of suggests that Reddit is using a relational database. So, if they’re not “normalizing” everything, why not use a completely different paradigm, like what MogoDB etc. has?

60k is a massive instance btw. Remake your account somewhere else to help out