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#lemmy /#kbin has a problem that #mastodon hasn't even attempted to solve; groups and what happens when they get popular. (mas.to)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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#lemmy/#kbin has a problem that #mastodon hasn't even attempted to solve; groups and what happens when they get popular.

#Communities, #groups, #magazines, whatever they are called are implemented as #Actors in #ActivityPub. They are basically just *very* popular users who boost a *lot*.

You can't just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @[email protected] or @[email protected] is going to get HOSED on the regular.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Funny how you say it's not a problem, then go on to describe the problem that needs to be dealt with. Dealing with scaling is a problem, and it's a problem that costs money.

Posts like this: https://lemm.ee/post/58472 suggest it is a problem. The rise in traffic seen by Lemmy in the last few days is absolutely tiny compared to a site like reddit, and already instances are struggling to cope. The recent growth in user registrations represents only about 0.007% of reddit's active user base. (~60K new Lemmy users vs 861,000,000 active monthly reddit users). A site like reddit costs millions to run.

There are 190+ Lemmy instances last time I checked, yet almost all the brunt of this load has been borne by a handful of servers, which see an inordinate amount of traffic while 100+ other servers sit around idle. Why should a handful of "lucky" servers have to pay all the hosting costs? What if a volunteer-run instance explodes to reddit-like levels of popularity? It will simply fold, unless the volunteer has serious money to throw at the problem.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Lemmy in the last few days is absolutely tiny compared to a site like reddit, and already instances are struggling to cope.

While this is true, 5 days ago lemmy.ml, the biggest instance, was on a 67 EUR server which is very small. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36270094

Posts like this: https://lemm.ee/post/58472 suggest it is a problem

This is a scaling problem (having more users means you need more mods) but I disagree with how they handled it and it isn't a money related thing. My thoughts on this are in an older post when this was first announced https://partizle.com/comment/64178

Why should a handful of “lucky” servers have to pay all the hosting costs?

My initial idea is to use the something awful model of paying a one time fee to register an acount. The problem is that people would just sign up on another instance that doesn't charge a fee but still add load to the lucky instance. Another approach could be to participate in communities on one of those lucky servers then you need to pay a one time fee to that server (comments would need to be removed by a bot if they're not made by an approved user). I'm not saying that's perfect, but it's an idea. Adsense is another idea.