LW definitely can’t handle more traffic than it already has. It already (thanks to the admins’ refusal to update to the latest version of Lemmy) takes multiple days for LW content to get federated to other instances properly, which is why I’ve had to switch over to this alt account of mine because there are zero comments on this post in my main instance. With more users, that delay would grow from days to potentially weeks.
Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?
As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.
Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as giving people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.
But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle enthusiasts.
Zagorath@lemm.ee 4 days ago
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)
We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There’s 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.
Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?
Eventually, it’s going to be ads, donations or payments. It’s all someone else’s computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.
balder1991@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I wouldn’t mind having some ads, but I wonder how some more extremists users would react.
But I strongly believe that depending on donations is a very tough place to be, it places the burden of “begging” on the instance owners, which are already doing all the work and should definitely be compensated somehow.
Emperor@feddit.uk 4 days ago
If you get a good deal on hosting then, on medium-sized instance donations easily cover costs. lemmy.world suggests this can scale up a lot even if you need more complex systems in place to deal with demand.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
That’s why I donate monthly to my instance :)
A pretty decent sized instance managed will uses a few boxes and some CDN, runs a couple to a few hundred a month, it doesn’t take that many people paying to cover it.
It’s not as bad managing the smaller instances. The app works like it says on the tin until you get really big.
IMO lemmy.world let themselves get WAY bigger than they should have. They had to start doing a hell of a lot more work to keep the thing up.
DefectiveFoundation@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Isn’t it easier to handle most users on on server than it is to have a bunch of equal servers? Then the problem just moves off the one server towards the communication between the servers being the bottleneck.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
The way lemmy (and federation) works, it needs to do a bunch of operations that can’t happen simultaneously, so there’s a job queue. The queue needs to do some database operations and a bunch of communication operations and each of the jobs needs to reach out to distant servers that may or may not be overwhelmed themselves.
You start with one server it costs almost nothing to host. Sooner or later you want to split out the job servers, then you end up needing to split out the database, when you start getting that many people on your server now you want to consider fault tolerance, Even after tuning you can only fit so many simultaneous users on a web server, you end up needing to do some load balancing. The next step would be trying to split it up geography-wise.
That’s scaling up and it’s what big companies do and it’s very expensive but easy for a small team to manage.
Lemmy on the other hand is designed to be scaled out, running smaller individual user bases on lighter hardware with a bunch of individual administrators instead of a organized team.
If people want to be on a large single cluster application Reddit is still there.
I like what we have a lot better.
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It costs me less than $10/mo to run mine and some of that is because I have to pay for an email forwarder until my hosting provider lets me start sending emails, part of that is factoring the cost of the domain name. The actual cloud server costs $5/mo right now.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Yeah, you can get away with really cheap operations up until you start blowing through your cdn and communication budget
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not too worried about it.