this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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First of all, as a software engineer I'm β well, "impressed" is the wrong word because I remember how efficient software used to be in the '90s β I'm "satisfied" with how well Lemmy instances are scaling. Even the largest instances are running on single, fairly-small servers.
Keep in mind that this is all alpha software and not only likely very unoptimized but also pretty buggy, so the surprisingly few problems there have been are more likely due to that than to real issues of scale.
Second, and more importantly, remember that having really big instances is "doing it wrong" to begin with. The intended design of Lemmy (and Fediverse services in general) is to have a whole lot of small instances, not a few big ones.
I guess my question is that you can't really control if a community grows to be huge or not. You can control who can create an account your instance, but unless you defederate, what happens if 20 million accounts subscribe to a single community? How is that load handled? Does it just collapse the entire instance under it's weight? Or is the fediverse just inherently built to stifle community growth past a certain scale?
I would hope that an instance/magazine that can't handle 20m users will have some sort of manual approval or other filter like Beehaw does. Beehaw defederated because they needed to breathe. Same with any other instance that begins to near its limit.
I was more referring about impacts of non-local users browsing communities on other instances. Which instance handles that load? If I browse lemmy.ml communities on my lemmy.world account am I impacting lemmy.world or lemmy.ml? What happens when all 35k lemmy.world users browse a lemmy.ml community because it's the most popular one? Does lemmy.ml need to support all their own users + any non-local visitors?
That's why I mentioned Beehaw. Beehaw defederated for this reason.