Sadly, I feel like the Fediverse, based on ActivityPub, was fundamentally designed wrong for scaling potential. I do like Fedi and I like ActivityPub, but I think instances should not have to be responsible for all of this:

• Owning user accounts
• Exclusively host communities
• Serving local and remote users webpages and media
• Never going down, as this results in users and content becoming unavailable

Because servers "own" the user accounts and communities it's not trivial for users to switch to a different instance, and as instances scale their costs go up slightly exponentially.

I wish the Fediverse from the beginning was a truly distributed content replication platform, usenet-style or Matrix-style, and every instance would add additional capacity to the network instead of hosting specific communities or users.

I guess it's a bit too late for a redesign now... Perhaps decentralized identifiers will take us there in some form in the future.

I've made https://lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz/ to help take off some of that load. New registrations are welcomed and it should be maintained for a very very long time 🎂

I'm going to set up a general purpose instance tomorrow with the intention of handling a relatively large number of users. The main problem is choosing a domain!

@nutomic lemmy.world is a new instance which can also be used.

I don't know what happened but in the last half hour the website has become highly responsive again. Thank you admins for your hard work.

I use kbin too.

New to this feedverse or how you call it.

Why isn't there one login that can post on all platforms and I have to signup on each separately?

If there is, you're not making it obvious I guess.

Is scaling the server a largely financial issue, or not? @nutomic@lemmy.ml

could you reasonably confidently say that you could 10x the amount of users for something like 1000$/mo on liberapay?
If so, would you mind setting a "goalpost" for the community to help lift the financial burden?

hehe just recovered my 3 year old account

lemmy.ml should be a roundrobin dns that sends you to a random instance in the pool. Or else you will re-centralize lemmy and curmble under the IT bill.

I hope it's not inappropriate to comment this here, but if anyone's looking for another space to join, I'm in the process of building Krab Borg. It would be lovely to have people to help fill it out and diversify the communities, as well as suggest what the local ones should look like as I have no idea.

I'm trying to balance not reinventing the wheel/duplicating existing communities 100 times but also still supporting the idea of decentralisation and creating some duplicates (though this isn't hard and fast, I'm open to feedback).

I've seeded it with some communities from other servers (including a bunch from lemmy.ml) to get things moving a bit as well.

is it possible to move an existing profile to a new server, like on Mastodon? or I need to create a new one and "start over"?

Hi, as one of the new people, is there a way to transfer to another instance or would I have to create a new account there?

I think lemmy will be bitten in the ass by not having considered clustering/horizontal scaling from the start. Federation alone as a scaling mechanism is only feasible for "nerds". But if the network wants to grow, we will need a few scale-able large hosted instances. And if their only choice is to scale vertically, there will be a hard limit (unless we put a good old Mainframe somewhere ^^).

Another downside of this design is: you can't run it with high availability. If there's only one process per instance, updating it will mean the whole instance is down. Sure, if all goes well this downtime is under a second. But if it doesn't go well or if a migration is needed, this might quickly become hours.

@nutomic@lemmy.ml It might be a good idea to default the Communities page to All instead of Local, to help push users into discovering other instances and promote them.

Point us to where the coin slot is. E.g. Patreon. We insert coin 🪙, you upgrade.