My expectation, or at least hope, is that Lemmy will grow horizontally, i.e. more instances for more specialised content, instead of vertically, i.e. more communities in singular, larger instances. Since it’s all federated, you can get to stuff in other instances.

I just had an idea. Let’s compare reddit and lemmy as land use metaphors.

Reddit is like one monolithic megacity. It’s full of communites, some big, encompassing entire neighbourhoods, and others smaller, having one street, one block, maybe even just one building.

Lemmy is like a country, with every instance a city. Some cities are big and varied, others are smaller and specialised, like ones dedicated entirely to fishing or aviation or being German. And you can choose a city to settle in and move between cities for your content. Some cities will be more open to sharing content with residents of other cities, and others will put up bigger restrictions. There are jokes about parts of the userbase on 4chan or Tumblr forming their own subcommunities, and the fediverse allows this in a very material way.

My expectation is that more cities may emerge as people develop more specialised communities. And since there are many cities, there is some resilience in the system. If an instance goes down, you’ve lost one instance. Out of christ knows how many. Chances are some of its content is duplicated across other instances, so nothing of value is lost. Meanwhile, if (/when) Reddit goes down, all of Reddit is gone.

In short, I hope lemmy develops more, smaller, specialised instances over time. Reddit allowed very niche insterests to have a corner, and despite that, I think the fediverse is more suited to allow for that than a centralised service.

The way i see it the best way forward would be each community runs there own instance and what we now call communities should become subtopics of that community.

So for example. Asklemmy could be an instance and its members are all people who believe in the value of that instance and want to be involved in sustaining it.

Explainlikeiam5 could be a subcommunities of this instance because its philosophy is largely the same. If asklemmy has plenty of scientist members they could open a askscience subcommunity too.

The majority of user traffic would all come from other smaller homerun instances.

Big instances that try to be everything at once are a side effect of the massive growth we are experiencing, they work now but will slowly become more centralized and are therefore doomed to fail (in my opinion)

To recalculate. How can we help Lemmy grow? By being proactive users that maintain something small we chose to care about.

As far as I’m aware lemmy does not support load balancing or high availability as it currently stands. But development is still in its infancy and I’m sure that’s a top priority

It’s a challenge, for sure. It is known that there are some inefficiencies in the codebase, which are actively being worked on. But besides that, it’s tricky to know where bottlenecks are until the user influx happens, particularly with the novel federation architecture. Maybe it’s impossible to scale, maybe not, but we only now are seeing a testable use case. I would expect optimization work to start bearing fruit, but these thing take time.

Education probably. Back in the day people didn’t have any problem understanding that different forums had different capabilities. When MMOs were in full swing, people didn’t have problems understanding what being on thr popular server during peak hours meant.

Everyone has just gotten too used to centralization with a lot of money behind it. Eventually people will adjust their expectations. Even if Meta’s fediverse attempt takes off, there are always going to be niche communities that exist outside of those spheres, so if people want that, they’ll have to move.

The point of the fediverse is having a choice. Some people are going to chose megacorp of the week’s offering and that’s okay as long a little pockets exist for when people get mad at the megacorp. Also federation leaves space for multiple dominant platforms in a way the current system doesn’t.

In short, eventually some instances are going to be bankrolled either through a robust crowdcourcing effort or through being a company. That’s okay. The purpose of the fediverse is to allow for smaller niche ideas to be able to breathe without having to adhere to one group’s ideals. “If you don’t like it, make your own” is a fair statement now

I love Lemmy but your question is legit. I just signed up with lemmy.world because lemmy.ml is slow/not responding.

Before making a post in lemmy.world guess what? lemmy.world isn’t responding. I know they have scheduled maintenance at 9 CET but it was 20 minutes before that.

Lemmy is entirely open source, so you can see what their architecture looks like, etc… here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.

Rate limits, as I understand them from the code, should only apply on a per-IP basis. So you should only be seeing rate limit errors if:

• your behind a CGNAT and multiple people who use your ISP are using Lemmy
• you’re sending A LOT of requests to your instance yourself
• the admin of your instance has significantly lowered the rate limits (viewable here: /api/v3/site)

Lemmy uses PostgreSQL, with a number of tables. It’s pretty standard stuff, looks like, and it’s in Rust. It’s assumed there’s only going to be one server per instance right now, but I’d expect that one server could keep up with a reasonable volume.

I already get rate-limited like crazy on lemmy and there are only like 60,000 users on my instance.

Is that a typical number of users to have already? Wow, we really are growing.

Rate limiting is it’s own thing, I guess some work will need to be done to find a non-exploitable way to do it that still scales.

The ideal way that ActivityPub federation works IMO is a bunch of smaller nodes coming together to make a large network.

If you have a bunch of people all on one or two instances then you’ll have a “central hub” of the network that’s constantly overloaded.

That’s my advice to community builders on this platform… Spread out across smaller instances, don’t just all sign up to a big one.

Larger instances will have to monetize to stay afloat. I’ve gone so far as to buy a domain that is very appropriate for a business-oriented Lemmy instance (specifically for job hunting and career development), but don’t yet have time or resources to take it to the next level.

Poorly. Lemmy will scale poorly.

I won’t be surprised if the larger instances start locking down more as a way to sustain themselves, like restricting communities or only allowing text posts.