As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.
Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.
Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.
When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a “fork” of Lemmy. 🤣
Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes “this is why Lemmy will fail.” Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how “poorly” Lemmy and Kbin were able to “capture” the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, “confusing interface”, and ask “thoughtful” questions on “how will they monetize”.
Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as “proof positive” that Lemmy and Kbin could never “succeed”.
What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.
It’s a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.
The problem is that there really doesn’t seem to be a great way to scale Lemmy. And yes, it’s federated, but if someone joins my instance and starts browsing and posting on lemmy.ml communities, they still get slammed by my users. And so any popular community is going to struggle because of the lack of ability to scale.
Not quite the case.
When a user on instance B subscribes to a community on instance A, instance A begins to send in real-time the posts and comments of that community to B, which keeps a local copy of that community.
If instance B has 10 active users subscribed to that community on A, they’re all loading it from instance B. The end result is instance A only had to share each piece of content once with instance B, and instance B further shares it with the ten local subscribers, reducing the load on instance A.
The only exception is when instance B only has a single subscriber to instance A’s community, in which case replicating the entirely of the community is more work then that user just browsing it directly on instance A.
Tl;dr it’s most efficient for a large Lenny instance if most of its active users are on other instances.
You seem like the right person to ask. If a user on instance b makes a comment on a post that is on an instance “a l” community my understanding is instance b sends that comment to instance a and then instance a sends messages to instances c, d, e, f, and so on telling them about the new comment?
Yes that does seem to be correct.
I believe that is correct.
I don’t think the math is quite right, because there are potentially a couple hundred read replicas that need updated on every comment. There is an M-N relationship where it gets better, and the asynchronicity helps direct load, but it’s still not what I would call efficient scaling.
Your instance will host a mirror of lemmy.ml communities, which will definitely reduce the load on lemmy.ml
Only with the caveat that you have at least 2 users that would view the same content. This gets significantly easier the more users you have on your instance. The most users you have, the more likely that your instance can reduce load on other instances.