Mastodawn

vepro Jul 4, 2023

(Controversial) Should lemmy.world close registrations at a certain user count?

https://lemmy.world/post/1019637

(Controversial) Should lemmy.world close registrations at a certain user count? - Lemmy.world

To support decentralization and spread, should lemmy.world close registration at some point to prevent a performance overload due to too many users? Of course, if registration is disabled, there could be a hint placed somewhere near that from other instances you can interact with content on lemmy.world just like you had registered on it. There could be a link to join-lemmys instance overview.

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Nine Jul 4, 2023

Depends on server loads and scaling.

If the engineer(s) and admin(s) running things can handle the costs associated with growth then I think it should stay open. However at a certain point the load on the infrastructure, sysadmins, and cost make that untenable.

It’s not cheap to run this kind of stuff. I know that first hand because of my career running HPC clusters and running them in cloud environments.

I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what this must be costing and I’m really thankful that someone is putting in the thankless labor of love. That’s why I canceled my Reddit premium and started donating to this instance to help with that in some way. The only other way I could help is donating my time & experience. But I think they need money more than engineers lol

The TL;DR is that if we want to keep these things online we need to donate money (and/or time/labor).

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r00ty

Even as a small instance operator, the media storage increases at a pretty steady rate. It's probably going to be a case of months or even years before it starts getting to costing money I will notice. But, still I guess we can by then start to purge very old stuff if we're not a big instance though.