sophsJul 6, 2023

How will lemmy instances survive if they get too big?

https://lemmy.world/post/1113268

How will lemmy instances survive if they get too big? - Lemmy.world

I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.

Show threadndguardian
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?
Jul 6, 2023 at 11:19pmWeb
Show threadSjatarJul 7, 2023

From 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.