The Beehaw admins made this choice, and documented their rationale here: https://beehaw.org/post/567170

I think a couple things are in play:

• Very few people consumed these comics as we are... reading each one in sequence. You'd more likely sporadically encounter them in the funnies section of a physical newspaper. Which was a pretty hit/miss proposition to begin with. No one expected every one to be a winner, and people would routinely skip over stuff that didn't interest them without thinking about it too hard. You're operating under the assumption that Far Side is a classic, but at the time people would just cruise by and think "that comic is stupid, just like 60% of the other stupid comics on this page". And folks were pretty happy to have 40% of comics be a bit funny.
• What made Far Side a classic was not its consistency. Rather, there were a few strips that became cultural phenomena. Basically a handful of hits that were breakout memes of the 80s and 90s. Colleges used to sell t-shirts of the school for the gifted strip with the kid pushing on the door that says pull, which is pretty accessible and one of those breakout hits.
• Because of those breakout hit strips, some folks got into Larson's style of humor enough that fewer of his strips were inscrutable to them and he had a lasting market.
• Other comments point about topical references and those are also a big deal. If someone sees a beans meme with no context 30y from now, it ain't gonna be funny. But a few weeks ago on lemmy, it was part of a contextual zeitgeist that was more or less about "these idiots will upvote anything, I'm one of the idiots... I'll upvote this!" and it kind of captured the exuberant excitement of not knowing what lemmy was but wanting it to be something. Similarly, these strips often weren't intended to last multiple generations. They assumed you were reading the newspaper RIGHT NOW... and so could reference current events very obliquely and still be accessible.

TLDR: Like a stupid meme, many Larson comics require shared transient context we're missing now. Some are also just fukin weird, like cow tools. But some were very accessible and became hugely popular. These mega-star strips cemented Far Side's popularity, and which gave Larson the autonomy to stay weird when he chose. Now we waste time trying to figure out what they meant.

Tests go in [email protected]

I thought that was the first rule of rendering web content? Or was it protocol parsers?

I remember, it was first rule of video game character creation screens:

Folks should not use lemmony to bootstrap their subscription count. It's not that hard to hit lemmyverse.net and just manually sub a bunch of stuff you're actually interested in, or to visit a big instance and browse their all feed unauthenticated.

But if you really want to automate community bootstrapping, lemmony is the worst of the scripts that doit because it defaults to subscribing to EVERYTHING, including all the porn, piracy, and hate communities on the most absent-admin'ed under-modded instances in the lemmyverse. Then your instance will mirror all those questionably legal communities and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet, creating hosting liability for you. Not to mention being a bad fediverse citizen and creating massive amounts of federation load on the instances forwarding you posts and comments from 20k communities that you don't read.

These two subscription bootstrapping scripts limit you to top subs by default... So you're more likely to be in well-modded territory and just the number of subs is smaller you you can review them and back out of anything sketchy. Subscriber-bot's docs do a good job of explaining the risks and problems of mass-subscription so you know what you're getting into.

• https://github.com/lflare/lemmy-subscriber-bot
• https://github.com/Fmstrat/lcs

You can't, but there's a github issue to enable this functionality: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985

The terms-of-use on every lemmy server I've seen would be considered underdeveloped by any lawyer I've ever met. Pragmatically:

• In the absence of a TOU that requires licensing content to participate, content posted directly to a lemmy server would probably get whatever the default treatment is either in the jurisdiction where the post was made or where the server is hosted (or maybe even that depends on the jurisdiction of each in complex ways). In the US that would mean all content is all-rights-reserved by default.
• But the poster/commenter isn't going to try to enforce their rights against lemmy. If they didn't want the content there, they wouldn't have put it there. And if they changed their mind they can delete it. And if they refuse to delete it themselves but contact an admin/mod... probably the admin/mod will just delete it for them.
• If the jurisdiction where the instance is hosted has a safe-harbor framework of some kind (like the US does), that would provide some protection from copyright claims on user-generated content provided the admins followed the requirements to be eligible (which I think most admins do even if they don't know it).
• Images and media hosted elsewhere but hotlinked from Lemmy may have their own TOU's (like imgur or whatever).

Overall, I'd say most of the lemmyverse has underbaked policy frameworks. The de-facto results function ok pragmatically anyway for what lemmy does on its own. Any scraping/reuse of content from Lemmy would have to navigate a very complex, confusing, and ambiguous licensing landscape. Probably 10y from now, if the Lemmyverse continues to grow, TOU's will be more common and more clear about open-licensing content or leaving it all-rights-reserved but giving lemmy a perpetual irrevocable non-exclusive right to distribute whatever you post here (the latter of which is more or less what's implicitly happening today).

It's important to recall that last week the biggest lemmy server in the world ran on a 4-core VM. Anybody that says you can scale from this to reddit overnight with "horizontal scaling" is selling some snake oil. Scaling is hard work and there aren't really any shortcuts. Lemmy is doing pretty well on the curve of how systems tend to handle major waves of adoption.

But that's not your question, you asked if Lemmy can horizontally scale. The answer is yes, but in a limited/finite way. The production docker-compose file that many lemmy installs are based on has 5 components. From the inside out, they are:

• Postgres: The database, stores most of the data for the other components. Exposes a protocol to accept and return SQL queries and responses.
• Lemmy: The application server, exposes websockets and http protocols for lemmy clients... also talks to the db.
• Lemmy-ui: Talks to Lemmy over websockets (for now, they're working to deprecate that soon) and does some fancy dynamic webpage construction.
• Nginx: Acts as a web proxy. Does https encryption, compression over the wire, could potentially do some static asset caching of images but I didn't see that configured in my skim of the config.
• Pict-rs: Some kind of image-hosting server.

So... first off... there's 5 layers there that talk to each other over the docker network. So you can definitely use 5 computers to run a lemmy instance. That's a non-zero amount of horizontal scaling. Of those layers, I'm told that lemmy and lemmy-ui are stateles and you can run an arbitrary number of them today. There are ways of scaling nginx using round-robin DNS and other load-balancing mechanisms. So 3 out of the 5 layers scale horizontally.

Pict-rs does not. It can be backed by object storage like S3, and there are lots of object storage systems that scale horizontally. But pict-rs itself seems to still need to be a single instance. But still, that's just one part of lemmy and you can throw it on a giant multicore box backed by scalable object storage. Should take you pretty far.

Which leaves postgres. Right now I believe everyone is running a single postgres instance and scaling it bigger, which is common. But postgres has ways to scale across boxes as well. It supports "read-replicas", where the "main" postgres copies data to the replicas and they serve reads so the leader can focus on handling just the writes. Lemmy doesn't support this kind of advanced request routing today, but Postgres is ready when it can. In the far future, there's also sharding writes across multiple leaders, which is complex and has its downsides but can scale writes quite a lot.

All of which is to say... lemmy isn't built on purely distributed primitives that can each scale horizontally to arbitrary numbers of machines. But there is quite a lot of opportunity to scale out in the current architecture. Why don't people do it more? Because buying a bigger box is 10x-100x easier until it stops being possible, and we haven't hit that point yet.

Fwiw, he has been providing quite a lot of transparency in his posts to this community. He's shared his hardware config in detail, posted maintenance posts with brief descriptions of what he's doing, and replied to comments around specific config tweaks. I haven't catalogued a list of links, but I've seen him do all of these things in the last 48h. It's easy to imagine that all these things could be compiled in real time into a how-to, but it's a pretty big deal just to keep the lights on right now, and pretty difficult to understand whether tweaks that helped your setup are generally applicable or only situationally useful and happen to perform well for your specific setup.

I'm sure we will see more high-performance Lemmy guides in the future, but at this point no one has more than 36h of experience with high-performance Lemmy. Give them a minute to catch up.

I'm not an admin, but have followed the sizing discussions around the lemmyverse as closely as I can from my position of lacking first-hand knowledge:

• lemmy.ml is the biggest instance by user count, but runs on incredibly modest 8-cpu hardware. Their cloud provider doesn't provide any easy scale up options for them, so they can't trivially restart on a bigger VM with their db and disk in place. I suspect this means that instance is going to suffer for a bit as they figure out what to do next.
• lemmy.world on the other hand was running on a box at least twice as big as lemmy.ml at last count, and I believe they can go quite a bit bigger if they need to.
• The lemmy.world admins also run mastodon.world and lived through the twitterpocalypse, seeing peak user registrations rates of 4k per hour. So this is not their first rodeo in terms of explosive growth, I'm sure that experience gives them some tricks up their sleeve.
• The admin team is pretty clearly technically strong. If I recall correctly, ruud is a professional database admin. One of the spooky parts of Lemmy performance-wise is the db. If ruud or others on the admin team custom-tuned their pg setup based on their own analysis of how/why it's slow, they may be getting more performance per CPU cycle than other instances running more stock configs or that are cargo-culting tweaks that aren't optimal for their setup without understanding what makes them work.

I'm surprised that sh.itjust.works isn't growing faster. They also have a hefty hardware setup and seemingly the technical admins to handle big user counts. I wonder if it's a branding problem, where lemmy.world sounds inviting and plausibly serious where sh.itjust.works sounds like clowntown even though it's run by a capable and serious team.

That behavior is about to change. There's already a jerboa update available that changes the thread-hiding trigger from long-tap on the comment header to regular-tap on the comment body (away from links and other tappable bits of the comment).

This update is available on f-droid now, but only came out yesterday I think. Might not be on the play store yet, but get ready for this to change on you.

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

This premise on which your question is based isn't actually true though. There's /r/technology and also /r/tech. There's /r/DnD and also /r/dndnext. As of recently, for some reason there are like 35 nearly identical amitheasshole subreddits with different names.

I feel like what you're observing is just that reddit communities are mature, people have had time to gravitate to whichever community is more active or has better quality moderation and so there is generally a "winner" sub with more participation because... unless there's a major problem with the bigger sub it tends to be more interesting than a less well-trafficked sub.

Lemmy, in contrast, is still fairly wild-west. Most communities are not very active and have only a few subscribers. If a competing community with an overlapping topic appears, folks are willing to subscribe to it just in case it takes off. If Lemmy continues to retain a healthy number of users, I expect in most cases that consolidation would set in unless there were major differences in moderation policy or something else that splits the community into factions that align across server or community boundaries... and over time you'll see a similar layout of one or two dominant communities and a long tail of tiny ones that few pay attention to.