this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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How can Lemmy scale? (self.lemmy)
submitted 1 year ago by HelloLemmySup to c/[email protected]
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I like the idea with Lemmy/kbin and the fediverse but theres something I dont understand perhaps.

If in the future Lemmy is very popular and someone wants to add their own server and federate with everyone then from that moment that new instance will get all new comments, posts, etc. from all other instances its federated with and must save them in its db. This means if Lemmy gets popular forget about little guys helping out spread the “load” because every intance still must take and save all new data. Thats a lot of processing power and storage. How can this work? I see in the future only a few instances will survive.

If somehow each instance was a node and only took care of its posts and comments and forward them to others upon request I can understand scaling but this is not how it works AFAIK. Another way would be with consensus algorithms where a node saves more thsn its own data but still not all.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Honestly that "problem" will only appear in a few dozens of years after an instance started federating with others.

Most content is plain text, which is inexpensive to store. The only real weakness are images if your instance's users post them a lot.

But it can be easily mitigated by configuring how big file uploads can be and encouraging the use of links.