this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)

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It's brief, around 25:15

https://youtube.com/watch?v=nf7XHR3EVHo


If you've been sitting on making a post about your favorite instance, this could be a good opportunity to do so.

Going by our registration applications, a lot of people are learning about the fediverse for the first time and they're excited about the idea. I've really enjoyed reading through them :)

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[–] imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works 280 points 2 days ago (70 children)

I wish he had mentioned Lemmy, but it's understandable that he didn't. Also Bluesky isn't an alternative to big tech, it IS big tech. I wish it wasn't stealing so much of our publicity lately.

But beggars can't be choosers, and we have seen some nice growth over the past couple months. John Oliver fans are the perfect candidates to join the fediverse, hopefully some of them find their way to Lemmy.

[–] balder1991@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (10 children)

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations, and that’s when the owner isn’t handling the costs themselves. I’m not sure how well most instances have right now.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc. like Reddit. Despite being useless stuff, it might provide some fun that would make hardcore users want to pay. But for that to work out, all apps would also need to show the posts awarded in a different way, so I think that’s unlikely.

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations,

We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There's 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc.

Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

Eventually, it's going to be ads, donations or payments. It's all someone else's computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.

[–] DefectiveFoundation@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Isn't it easier to handle most users on one server than it is to have a bunch of equal servers? Then the problem just moves off the one server towards the communication between the servers being the bottleneck.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 days ago

The way lemmy (and federation) works, it needs to do a bunch of operations that can't happen simultaneously, so there's a job queue. The queue needs to do some database operations and a bunch of communication operations and each of the jobs needs to reach out to distant servers that may or may not be overwhelmed themselves.

You start with one server it costs almost nothing to host. Sooner or later you want to split out the job servers, then you end up needing to split out the database, when you start getting that many people on your server now you want to consider fault tolerance, Even after tuning you can only fit so many simultaneous users on a web server, you end up needing to do some load balancing. The next step would be trying to split it up geography-wise.

That's scaling up and it's what big companies do and it's very expensive but easy for a small team to manage.

Lemmy on the other hand is designed to be scaled out, running smaller individual user bases on lighter hardware with a bunch of individual administrators instead of a organized team.

If people want to be on a large single cluster application Reddit is still there.

I like what we have a lot better.

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