Asklemmy

43775 readers

1272 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

119

How will lemmy instances survive if they get too big? (lemmy.world)

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

76 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I know there's donations and the owners can use their own money, but there's a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 year ago (1 children)

By having more instances and better user distribution. Running a small-ish instance isn't very expensive, around 5-10 euro a month (some VPS providers are cheaper, etc). As Lemmy development continues, and more optimizations come in, these smaller lemmy instances will be able to support more users.

There is also a discussion on GitHub to introduce user and community migrations between instances. So once that feature is implemented, it will be easier to redistribute everything across all Lemmy instances.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a point where there are so many instances that propagating all that data is too taxing and worse than having fewer bigger instances?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Is there a point where there are so many instances that propagating all that data is too taxing

Yes, that becomes a concern as the network size grows and the amount of aggregate replication traffic increases. Mastodon has like 10x the server count of Lemmy, though... so that's hopeful. They do use ActivityPub differently though, it possible that federation scales differently between them.

This GitHub issue has a lot of good (but rough and high-level) thoughts on future scaling techniques: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3062