Comment on I reckon this is the usage distribution of Lemmy servers that we'll end up with.

poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• grue@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Email has been “dying” for 20+ years. I’ll believe it when I see it.

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• LesserAbe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  We should have large semi-centralized services. But they should be democratically controlled.

  Do you ever think about why cities form? Rural life has a lot of appealing characteristics, plus it’s the starting state of the world. Cities form because there is an advantage to size, proximity and specialization. If we had a new planet and completely evenly distributed the population across its land, we’d very quickly form cities regardless.

  It’s the same with centralized services. It takes a lot of special knowledge and equipment to run an email service. The average Lemmy user may have those resources, but even here, how many of us run our own email servers?

  It costs less per person in resources to add more users after the first one. So there’s an incentive to aggregate users together. And once you have a certain number of users, maybe you figure out some way to fund your operation, and you can pay more people to add features/capabilities. Soon your entity not only has more users, it’s more appealing than a plan vanilla email service, and you get even more users. You’re doing it cheaper and better than the DIYers.

  I think centralization and size are naturally occurring. We should think about ways to exist and benefit from them, so something like Gmail but run as a worker cooperative.

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    As someone who run a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn’t as simple as that.

    Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn’t linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn’t just a system operator question.

    So no, unless you wsnt to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial bumb, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.

    Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.

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    • LesserAbe@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      My argument isn’t about the fediverse specifically. It’s that centralization is a naturally occurring phenomenon, and the lack of friction resulting from centralization can make it more competitive.

      What is the reason the cost per user of hosting a Lemmy server goes up after a few thousand users? If it were say, you need more expensive hardware, that doesn’t necessarily disprove my argument. Just because a bigger investment is needed doesn’t mean it’s not cheaper per user or not more competitive. Just that you or I don’t have the capital, or that we might see centralization bad because we have bad experiences with centralized entities.

      Also just because something is more competitive doesn’t mean it’s morally or aesthetically more desirable. The specialized army fed and trained by an empire overruns the brave and happy tribe of hunter gatherers.

      What I’m saying is since we know the phenomenon of centralization occurs, we should try to subvert it as much as possible by introducing democratic structures.

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      • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Lets agree to disagree on the “natural” centralisation aspect, which is IMHO nonsense. And very recently the US empire was beaten by some tribes in Afghanistan, so I think your argument needs some further thinking 😏

        The reason it gets so much more expensive after a few thousand users is complexity. Up to that point a single server can be used and the necessary sysadmin skills are not very high. Basically anyone with a few weeks of training can rent a server and run such an instance.

        After a few thousand users it gets steeply more complex, when you need to think about running a database cluster and load-balance the frontends etc. Not very many people have the necessary skillset for that, and even less are volunteering to do this. So you end up being forced to hire someone expensive with a high in demand skill. Basically you operation suddenly jumps from a easy to fund with donations volunteer effort, to a must commercialize or otherwise fund venture that is highly unsustainable in the short term.

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    • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further.

      As a fellow Lemmy admin of a smaller instance, do you have any advice? Any resources that might be worth checking out?

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      • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Well, like I wrote below, it is basically about scaling Lemmy across multiple servers, with all the complexity that entails. I am probably not the best person to given advise on that though.

        If our smaller instance ever gets to a size that is not feasible to run on a single server anymore, we will likely close registrations.

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