this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Poorly. Lemmy will scale poorly.
I won't be surprised if the larger instances start locking down more as a way to sustain themselves, like restricting communities or only allowing text posts.
Sometimes you have just to accommodate to the situation and keep going until it settles down. The error I think here is thinking something can’t have flaws and issues, even more if it’s not behind a corporations. And no one wants corporations.
It isn't about accommodating to the situation, but planning for long term growth.
Right now, instances of Lemmy don't have any way to fund server costs other than asking for donations. Outside of Wikipedia, that isn't a sustainable business model. How is Lemmy supposed to survive if, every time a sub gains critical mass, it shuts down?
Which is part of any scaling effort, and you can’t really guess through predicting and resolving bottlenecks, it takes some serious expertise. And as far as I know, the Lemmy devs have never built a high-scale service before, and I think that is possibly the single biggest risk to the growth and success of the Lemmy project in general.
Source: that’s my job, I’ve been doing that for some of the most high-scale services in the world for about a decade. I absolutely could help, actually I’d love to, but I definitely won’t under current Lemmy leadership, for reasons: https://lemmy.world/comment/596235
I get the feeling that the development leadership is going to have to change, with either the current developers bringing on leadership that can manage the growth or someone forks Lemmy and that becomes the default. The current developer model, like the current admin monetization model, can't stand as is in its current form.
That is what I’m rooting for. Alas I can imagine how they might cling to it, even if at the detriment of the project. Or not, I don’t particularly have any information. My fingers are crossed…
How about helping Kbin?
I think Kbin is something good being built by good people, I get what they’re trying to do, but unfortunately I don’t have a lot of faith that it will turn out to be a successful project.
In terms of technical scaling, I’m puzzled that they went with an interpreted language if the goal is scale. I get that the basic usage of Kbin’s features may not require a ton of CPU-heavy operations, or a fine handling of the memory; but once it meets sufficient scale, there will have to be some scale edge-case bottlenecks where you’ll want to step out of the beaten path and get lower-level, so I’m a bit confused about why they chose a technology that will make those harder to get past rather than easier. PHP is great for rapid prototyping, but I’d argue that’s not what the vision should be here.
About community scale, I’m not expert, but they seem to really care to offer a karma system; and we’ve seen the karma-farming behavior that this has been incentivizing on Reddit. I don’t see why it would be any different here if enough people end up joining. Lemmy is intentionally not offering a karma system, and it really feels like the healthier move long-term.
I think all it would take would be for the Lemmy devs to admit that they’re in over their heads, and that their political affiliations have been a hindrance to the project, to the point that they transition the governance of it to other people. I really hope they do that. If they do soon enough, they’re so far ahead and built on so much more long-term thinking, that I think it would pretty much make Kbin kinda obsolete. I have no special information about this, so I could be wrong, and I hope for them that I am; but I can see that as a pretty likely outcome.
(That, and on the shorter-term, I wouldn’t contribute to a product I don’t use, and I can’t use it for now because my usage is 100% mobile, and the current lack of API means no native client. I wish the mobile web was better than it is as an application platform…)
Have you found that their political leanings have affected you in any way? Just curious if you have some sort of bias that's making you think people on the left can't produce efficient software.
It hasn’t. But letting terrible people have power affects the world in normalizing violence and hatred. It’s not about left or right, if they were American racists against Chinese people, I would have the exact same problem. I’m personally quite on the left, but without the hate.
I am living safe and not being targeted with hateful violence like the Uyghurs or North Koreans are, so this is far, far more important than what can affect me.
Sorry I don't want to turn this into a debate but I feel like you're being disingenious; black people are getting killed all around your country because of their skin colour, and you have private prisons that systematically exploit prison labour. How are the social, political, and cultural challenges for your country different than theirs? I live in a country the USA has deemed an autocracy, I'm not apart of the ruling class, but I am living safe and not being targeted with hateful violence. Likewise, are you ignorant to the plight of ethnic minorities in your country and the hateful violence they experience? It just seems so chauvanist of you to say that your country is superior than anothers because you have the privilege of being "safe".
I am not, I actually volunteer 5h a week to teach kids in underprivileged neighborhoods, in an attempt to reduce the racial gap in the United States. There are a lot of racial problems in the US, due to the botched Reconstruction of the 19th century; and I firmly agree that it’s our common responsibility that to act to remediate this. I think education is a powerful weapon to bring opportunities and safety, so that’s where my focus is.
I guess the difference between someone like the Lemmy devs and you, and someone like me, is that I’m fully aware there are problems everywhere, but I won’t automatically associate someone’s nationality/residency to those problems; only what those people explicitly say about it. I initially considered that the issues people were having with the Lemmy devs were because they were not being US-centric, until I was linked to their past hateful posts on Reddit. I can’t believe they actually took questions on r/AskATankie; before that I was annoyed that people were calling them “tankies” because it sounded like a slur, I had no idea they actually identified as such. It’s the same feeling I get when I see Americans carrying a Nazi flag or a Confederate flag. So disheartening.
It is convenient to think of the world as divided in nationalities, a lot of things would be simpler. You need to realize that it’s a bit more complicated than that. China has a lot of successful high-scale services, with TikTok, Weibo, Alibaba, etc. It would be excellent if, for instance, ownership of Lemmy moved to a Chinese engineer (or a team of Chinese engineers of course) who helped with scaling those; provided it’s not someone with hateful view who self-identifies as a tankie. It doesn’t sound like a lot to ask.
Wherever you live, I am glad you are personally safe. I mean it for real. It’s better if you do things around you for those who aren’t, but I don’t resent people who don’t, we all do what we can.
Your point for Lemmy passing the governance of their project could happen. Or, as the number of other contributors increase, people will think that the impact of the two creators is diluted.
Or, at some point, someone creates a fork of Lemmy still based on ActivityPub, still compatible with both Lemmy and Kbin, but without any of Lemmy's political background '
Exactly, that’s what I’m rooting for.
It is not like any other social network has become sustainable business. Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, FB all are net losers with all trials with and selling user data.
We can safely say that after almost 20 we still don't have sustainable business model for soc networks.
Let's try with donations.