We had a good run, thank you everyone
We had a good run, thank you everyone
It is!
Would you like to know more?
Yeah, my main problem so far has been finding communities actually worth following/joining/contributing to.
If suddenly tons of average people join, they wonât really find communities, theyâll deem that their analysis of Lemmy, and leave with tiny chances of a second chance. Itâll just boom and bust in itâs current state. Most people arenât interested in starting or growing a small community.
Meanwhile, if we stay at this size for a while, communities may form/grow, and as people trickle in, theyâll grow bit by bit.
The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on usersâ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesnât seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesnât handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But thatâd be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
My main gripe with ActivityPub is that the infrastructure basically replicates 1-to-1 across subscribed instances. It means that as lemmy grows, servers will require more and more storage to keep up. For now, itâs fine since weâre under a few TB of content on the platform.
If lemmy were to be as popular as reddit, weâd reach the dozens if not hundreds of TB of storage required. Not everyone has the money to build such a homelab or rent data center servers of that caliber.
ActivityPub in itâs current state is nothing but replicated centralization, not a full decentralized protocol. Weâd probably need a different database system that handles cross region clustering and sharing to scale it up.
I hope that the lemmy devs take this time to look at how theyâre distributing users. We need a better browser for people to find what instances to join. The next Reddit exodus is going to be massive and .ml and .world arenât ready for it.
The brain-drain has already happened on reddit and itâs only a matter of time before the good content and 3rd party development explodes here on Lemmy.