4 ms·

...aaaand it's down already I love the idea of a fediverse but I am not sure how it can possibly scale up to large communities. As long as people have to spin

...aaaand it's down already I love the idea of a fediverse but I am not sure how it can possibly scale up to large communities. As long as people have to spin up their own node to host one, it seems forever limited to small groups of not more than perhaps a few hundreds users.

Sakos 3y ago
Agree. Imo, alternatives like lemmy just poison the well when they can't handle a tiny fraction of the users of a single subreddit.
- remram 3y ago
  I'm sure Reddit didn't crash ever in the early days, and I'm sure it was handling this kind of traffic from the get-go /s Modern day Reddit couldn't even handle the protests against it.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    lemmy doesn't need to compete against 1999's Reddit, or whenever it was released. It needs to compete against modern Reddit, which has massive communities with hundreds of thousands of members.
    - remram 3y ago
      It doesn't need to do that on with 100% uptime on the day it launches. Especially if Reddit itself is going down this week.
javajosh 3y ago
Like so many people you underestimate the capacity of modern computers. Stack Overflow is famously hosted on like 6 machines. I personally worked on a system that was running on two machines, one a hot backup, that served highly dynamic content to 400k monthly actives.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I think you underestimate software engineers. I can bring a 64 core 512 GiB machine to its knees with a trivial program. Imagine what I could do when I'm trying to be productive.
  - api 3y ago
    This is called Eroom's Law: "Software bloat increases until it consumes all gains from Moore's Law."
- api 3y ago
  As with "big data," the threshold for what qualifies as "hyperscale" increases exponentially with time. Hyperscale 10 years ago can be served from a few machines at Hetzner today... if you write efficient software. Big data of 10 years ago can be analyzed on a laptop today. 10 years from now you'll probably be able to host today's Twitter from a shelf in your basement if you could get enough bandwidth. That being said all this is predicated on efficient software. Unfortunately I don’t get the impression the fediverse stuff is that efficient. Isn’t at least some of it Ruby, the slowest platform available? If it were Go, Rust, Java, etc it’d probably be handling the load a lot better. Even PHP is faster by far.
  - porphyra 3y ago
    Lemmy is implemented in Rust I thought EDIT: here's a good discussion: https://programming.dev/comment/133415 https://programming.dev/comment/133415
    - codetrotter 3y ago
      Part of Lemmy is Rust. And then for some reason the web-ui has both a frontend and a backend component as well, and the backend component of the web-ui is written in Javascript. I wonder to which extent this negatively impacts the perf of Lemmy.
- willcipriano 3y ago
rjh29 3y ago
Maybe that's not such a bad thing.
codetrotter 3y ago
Loads fine for me now. Try again?
- smcleod 3y ago
  Dead for me?
remram 3y ago
This comment is also a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36341414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36341414

Sakos 3y ago

Agree. Imo, alternatives like lemmy just poison the well when they can't handle a tiny fraction of the users of a single subreddit.

remram 3y ago
I'm sure Reddit didn't crash ever in the early days, and I'm sure it was handling this kind of traffic from the get-go /s Modern day Reddit couldn't even handle the protests against it.
- Sakos 3y ago
  lemmy doesn't need to compete against 1999's Reddit, or whenever it was released. It needs to compete against modern Reddit, which has massive communities with hundreds of thousands of members.
  - remram 3y ago
    It doesn't need to do that on with 100% uptime on the day it launches. Especially if Reddit itself is going down this week.

javajosh 3y ago

Like so many people you underestimate the capacity of modern computers. Stack Overflow is famously hosted on like 6 machines. I personally worked on a system that was running on two machines, one a hot backup, that served highly dynamic content to 400k monthly actives.

renewiltord 3y ago
I think you underestimate software engineers. I can bring a 64 core 512 GiB machine to its knees with a trivial program. Imagine what I could do when I'm trying to be productive.
- api 3y ago
  This is called Eroom's Law: "Software bloat increases until it consumes all gains from Moore's Law."
api 3y ago
As with "big data," the threshold for what qualifies as "hyperscale" increases exponentially with time. Hyperscale 10 years ago can be served from a few machines at Hetzner today... if you write efficient software. Big data of 10 years ago can be analyzed on a laptop today. 10 years from now you'll probably be able to host today's Twitter from a shelf in your basement if you could get enough bandwidth. That being said all this is predicated on efficient software. Unfortunately I don’t get the impression the fediverse stuff is that efficient. Isn’t at least some of it Ruby, the slowest platform available? If it were Go, Rust, Java, etc it’d probably be handling the load a lot better. Even PHP is faster by far.
- porphyra 3y ago
  Lemmy is implemented in Rust I thought EDIT: here's a good discussion: https://programming.dev/comment/133415 https://programming.dev/comment/133415
  - codetrotter 3y ago
    Part of Lemmy is Rust. And then for some reason the web-ui has both a frontend and a backend component as well, and the backend component of the web-ui is written in Javascript. I wonder to which extent this negatively impacts the perf of Lemmy.
willcipriano 3y ago

rjh29 3y ago

Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

codetrotter 3y ago

Loads fine for me now. Try again?

smcleod 3y ago
Dead for me?

remram 3y ago

This comment is also a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36341414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36341414