this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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The post is from 2 years ago but it does pose an important question which few people really talk about. The Fediverse isn't scaling.
Sure, it's probably worth the tradeoff, but what happens when we actually get so many people that servers start to collapse? Lemmy has ~45k active users, but let's say we jump to 1 million active users. Small servers will stop working due to too much traffic, medium servers will need way more money to process the thousands of images per day, large servers will become too centralized. We're already slowly going that way with the instance count steadily going down and users/instance going up.
None of this matters now but within the next 5, 10 years I think we really need a game plan in order for these platforms to succeed. You can't just increase the servers to spread the load, the load on all instances is steadily going up.
Will we need to move to a subscription service?
someone has to pay for infrastructure. i think if we can solve for intra-instance load balancing, community-funded instances and maybe centralized content hosting services instances could subscribe to it might get us to the next level. not sure after that.