The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
My main gripe with ActivityPub is that the infrastructure basically replicates 1-to-1 across subscribed instances. It means that as lemmy grows, servers will require more and more storage to keep up. For now, it’s fine since we’re under a few TB of content on the platform.
If lemmy were to be as popular as reddit, we’d reach the dozens if not hundreds of TB of storage required. Not everyone has the money to build such a homelab or rent data center servers of that caliber.
ActivityPub in it’s current state is nothing but replicated centralization, not a full decentralized protocol. We’d probably need a different database system that handles cross region clustering and sharing to scale it up.
If you don’t mirror everything locally, you can lose data when other instances go down. Decentralization just has high data costs, take a look at git or bitcoin.
I just hope ActivityPup learned something from Diaspora, where small instances couldn’t handle the amount traffic comming from big instances.
My point was that there is no need to replicate everything everywhere. If the data is replicated a cross 5 instances per region for instance, it’s enough for replication needs. If you self host lemmy and subscribes to large communities on your instance, you can quickly overload your server. We need activity pub to be more lightweight if we want smaller instances to thrive.
I’m interested in seeing how well these great open source apps for Lemmy scale as the user base and post/comment data grows.
The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
My main gripe with ActivityPub is that the infrastructure basically replicates 1-to-1 across subscribed instances. It means that as lemmy grows, servers will require more and more storage to keep up. For now, it’s fine since we’re under a few TB of content on the platform.
If lemmy were to be as popular as reddit, we’d reach the dozens if not hundreds of TB of storage required. Not everyone has the money to build such a homelab or rent data center servers of that caliber.
ActivityPub in it’s current state is nothing but replicated centralization, not a full decentralized protocol. We’d probably need a different database system that handles cross region clustering and sharing to scale it up.
If you don’t mirror everything locally, you can lose data when other instances go down. Decentralization just has high data costs, take a look at git or bitcoin. I just hope ActivityPup learned something from Diaspora, where small instances couldn’t handle the amount traffic comming from big instances.
My point was that there is no need to replicate everything everywhere. If the data is replicated a cross 5 instances per region for instance, it’s enough for replication needs. If you self host lemmy and subscribes to large communities on your instance, you can quickly overload your server. We need activity pub to be more lightweight if we want smaller instances to thrive.