sophsHow will lemmy instances survive if they get too big?
fuboWhy? A single Linux server has been able to support tens of thousands of simultaneous clients for many years now.
Are you talking about a specific server or just Linux servers in general?
mrmanagerI think this doesn’t apply? Aren’t they talking about 10k simultaneously connected users here? With http you connect and disconnect for every request.
Bandwidth is not free.
Text is small.
The €5/mo VPS my instance runs on has 20TB bandwidth included.
So while it is not free, it can certainly be very, very inexpensive.
It’s super cheap. A lot of us nerds have very good incomes and can pay for an instance that has like 40 gb of network traffic for less than 10 dollars per month.
simpleBy 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.
That sort of thing should be a self-correcting problem to an extent - when performance drops, people will (hopefully) move to other intances. Also, a well-managed instance would stop accepting new members before it go to that point.
Also, there would be developers watching fediverse.observer to see if few registrations are open, but sign-ups are climbing in all open instances. Of course they are going to jump in if there’s an opportunity.
People will only do that if they can migrate all the past history to a new instance and the syncing issues between instances are fixed
As opposed to a corperate social media site, Lemmy has waaaay lower operating costs (not servers). It’s open source so dev work is volunteer, and there isn’t a bunch of resources dedicated to squeezing users for every penny or appeasing advertisers.
Servers can get pricey for sure, but not having all of that other overhead goes a ways to making it more sustainable.
Worse come to worse I’m here for a good time not a long time.
Like if an instance like lemmy.world gets too big and fails I’ll probably head to another instance like kbin.social. If it starts a failure cascade people will leave for traditional social media or just leave social media entirely until federation can support it.
Maybe I end up leaving for another social media site, or I just watch youtube and no real social media or something. Whatever happens I’m here while I’m here.
empireOfLoveMost instances will hit a hard cap where the user support can’t scale anymore. Admins will have to close sign-ups and force new users to other instances to distribute the load. That’s the point of federation.
The issue is admins do not yet know where the limits are, and Lemmy still needs a lot more backend optimization work.
The dogspaw A large instance only needs a fraction of users to donate to be viable mastodon.social has like 100k users and they run on donations
Wikipedia has been running on donations for so many years. So I don’t think we are close to reaching that limit in any way
Wikipedia get donation from rich people and big corporations. I don’t think the fediverse that level of donation
ThiefI run a lemmy server and its actually very hard to encourage people to sign up and use the server as they have to resubscribe to their communities manually or with a script and people just dont want to do it for basically very little gain for themselves individually even if when hundreds of people do it collectively it helps reduce load on popular servers. Its kind of like the climate change issue. One person doing it on their own doesnt change much and incurs a lot of work so why bother? Even if it is true that 1000 people moving would make a measurable difference.
lemmy.myserv.one if you do want to join, however.
Hopefully they will implement export and import of subscribed communities soon to make relocation easier.
I know it’s not user friendly, but this script exists:
github.com/wescode/lemmy_migrate#migrate-your-sub…
I’ve been wondering about this not so much from a performance perspective, but rather from a storage perspective. Assuming old posts and comments are never cleaned up, a handful of particularly active instances could easily crush federated smaller instances storage, right?
SjatarFrom my understanding a instance will only interact with posts and comments (store them) when a user on that instance does. So just federating with a older instance that has a large back catalogue does not mean it will flood the small instance.
Side note about images. They seem to only ever be saved locally on the server it was uploaded to. So custom emojis like will not be saved on for example lemmy.ml (here). Only on my self hosted instance.
So I was wondering is it helpfull if i run my own instance than for me and my roommates ? Or ?
ShittyKopper [they/them]Sure why not. Plenty of us have single user instances.
Bappityhaving a job on the side will help instance owners a lot
I mean, define “too big”.
Lemmy.world and mastodon.world are funded from mastodon.world’s OpenCollective account: opencollective.com/mastodonworld
They seem to be doing alright atm, though who knows how much of that is a byproduct of recent immigration.
The better question is, how will lemmy survive if instances get too big. The whole point of the fediverse is to prevent centralization.
IMO we need self-imposed regulations that are community enforced. In the context of user count, the community should decide on an appropriate max active user count. Each instance should deactivate signups if they’re over the limit, and if they refuse, other instances should defederate them until they do. In general I’m not a fan of defederation, but I also don’t think we should defederate threads just because it’s owned by Meta. It should be defederated because it’s behavior is anti-fediverse.