this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
120 points (93.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43835 readers
781 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Scaling is a big concern with Lemmy, and pretty much any Fediverse platform. However the positive side is the software can adapt and as it becomes more popular it will naturally acquire more resources.
Admins do have control over the size of their instance. They can shut down new sign-ups if they get to a point where they can't support any more users. They can either expand their capacity or leave sign-ups closed. Ideally as you get more users you get more support through donations which can cover the cost of expansion.
Another aspect is how well ActivityPub can hold up to demand as more and more instances enter the fold (ActivityPub is the protocol standard that supports the Fediverse). Hopefully the designers have put a lot of thought into scalability. ActivityPub has mechanisms to limit instance resources to what's on demand from users of that instance. It's not like each instance has to accommodate the whole of data and bandwidth comprised by the platform.
As users we'll just have to see how it holds up and have some faith the designers did a good job with scalability. I think the other aspect of having enough instances to support the size of the user base will work itself out naturally.