this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
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It just needs horizontal so that you could throw more servers at an instance and improve performance.
At some point a single community will be so active that one server won't be enough , it's better not to split it just so that it will be easier for the software.
I'd argue the exact opposite. We should strive for more instances and for Lemmy's userbase to be spread around. The fact that is scaling out (more instances) is easier than scaling up (beefier servers) is a feature, not a bug.
It's not exactly something that you can force. If X amount of users want to join an instance Y, the instance should be able to provide capabilities to host those users. Besides, horizontal scaling provides other benefits, stability is the main one - if one server instance goes down, others can immediately pick up the slack.
Why? And who pays for that?
Why not? I don't see the drawback to develop ability to do horizontal scaling. If the instance owner doesn't want to add additional servers, it's up to them. Obviously they paid for it if they decide to add.
Just to be clear, horizontal scaling means multiple servers handling same instance, it can be the backend service to allow handling more traffics, or multiple db to reduce database loads.
Additionally it allows high availabilities, so if one of the backend service is down (either unexpectedly or do rolling update) the other service can still active so the instance can still be accessed by users
Lemmy.ml did exactly that and is one reason why lemmy.world got to be that big.
Once the server capacity is reached the instance should be closed and people will just go to another one.
I don't understand why people feel so happy about lemmy.world being ahead of the rest. It's against the point of the fediverse and has risks: the instance can be sold, can make decisions to put advertisement etc. It's like people didn't really understand what was wrong with reddit to begin with and how the fediverse tries to be different.