I already get rate-limited like crazy on lemmy and there are only like 60,000 users on my instance. Is each instance really just one server or are there multiple containers running across several hosts? I’m concerned that federation will mean an inconsistent user experience. Some instances many be beefy, others will be under resourced… so the average person might think Lemmy overall is slow or error-prone.

Reddit has millions of users. How the hell is this going to scale? Does anyone have any information about Lemmy’s DB and architecture?

I found this post about Reddit’s DB from 2012. Not sure if Lemmy has a similar approach to ensure speed and reliability as the user base and traffic grows.

https://kevin.burke.dev/kevin/reddits-database-has-two-tables/

  • marsara9@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Lemmy is entirely open source, so you can see what their architecture looks like, etc… here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy.

    Rate limits, as I understand them from the code, should only apply on a per-IP basis. So you should only be seeing rate limit errors if:

    • your behind a CGNAT and multiple people who use your ISP are using Lemmy
    • you’re sending A LOT of requests to your instance yourself
    • the admin of your instance has significantly lowered the rate limits (viewable here: /api/v3/site)
    • radix@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m not an expert, but I thought the issue was generally that big instances like lemmy.world were getting overloaded on the server side, not that they were enforcing a manufactured rate limit on individual IPs.

      Also, someone else mentioned that on the fediverse even simple things like an upvote are slower and require more work here than in centralized platforms because they must be sent to all the instances that are indexing that user/community. As I understand, that’s inherent to the fediverse, a bug not a feature, designed for redundancy and resilience.

      Again uninformed, but Lemmy seems like it should scale fine. Bigger instances will monetize, driving prospective users to smaller instances, and then rate limiting and server lag won’t be so bad anymore.