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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • Understood on scaling instances, but even those instances will eventually outstrip a single server’s capabilities. In considering the question as to whether or not Lemmy can replace Reddit, the question really comes down to how well and seamlessly Lemmy can scale.

    In a lot of applications, scaling beyond a server introduces what can be some pretty gnarly complexity around things like database consistency between nodes, and things like that. I’m sure Lemmy can handle that to a point by spawning new instances, but, right now, they depend in users having sufficient awareness to even know how to do that whereas Reddit’s sign up experience is pretty streamlined.

    All of this is solvable, but at some point, someone will ask the question, “who is going to pay for this capacity?” and we’ll be back in a place where we have to either decide whether o pay a monthly fee, support ads, or see or data sold. Infrastructure and people to support it are expensive.

    There will also ultimately be legal compliance needs (GDPR, CCPA, etc), tax compliance as a monetization model - even if it’s just to cover expenses- is established.

    I do want to see Lemmy succeed, but there will be a lot of reality to consider eventually.


  • I don’t know a lot about lemmy.world, but it seems to be running on “a server”. The person that wrote this may have used it as a simpler way to mean “the overall infrastructure that runs lemmy”.

    However, if it really is “a server”, there will eventually be a breaking point where continuing to scale gets a lot harder, more complex, and more expensive. A lot of people don’t really understand that a site like Reddit has a massive infrastructure as its foundation. That’s how it can handle millions of connections, billions of comments, and stay - more or less - available.

    It’s expensive to run.

    Lemmy can’t ever hope to replace Reddit without some kind of significant investment in infrastructure and possibly development. If the code isn’t written to support scaling out (as opposed to scaling up and just throwing more RAM, CPU, and storage at a single system), it can’t replace Reddit.

    That’s not to say that I’m not loving Lemmy. I do. I have barely opened Reddit since Friday after apollo died. At some point, though, money will become a factor here as well.