Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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Honestly, at this point im hoping reddit fucks up even more so that more people switch to lemmy, seems most are switching now more than ever, heck its the reason why i heard about it in the first place
I want Lemmy to succeed, but I'm highly skeptical of the ability of the instance operators to be able to do so. There's a great deal of technical sophistication that is required to support a large number of users, and from what I've seen, they don't have it. This isn't a slight against them in any way, but they freely admit that they lack SQL expertise, and I think I've seen some significant gaps in their knowledge on how to horizontally scale. This instance, for example, is all hosted on a single virtual server. There are no load balancers, no database sharding, no fanning out of services onto different servers...security is as well also likely in a shoddy state.
Again, no hate from me, nothing but praise so far. But there are some significant technological gaps here, and I worry their team isn't large or technically deep enough to fill them. What's in place at the moment is just waiting to tip over when any amount of traffic starts coming over. For what it's worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.
There's also a financial problem here. Money is needed to scale vertically or horizontally. Are the admins of lemmy.ml paying out of pocket currently? With current donations would they be able to scale?
I still don't fully get how the federated thing works. Would it help with scaling and keeping costs low for lemmy.ml? I know you offload the user creation and frontend stuff to another server, but say if I use anotherlemmy.xyz to mainly interact with communities of lemmy.ml would that take a significant load off of lemmy.ml?