Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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As someone who runs a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn't as simple as that.
Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn't linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred-thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn't just a system operator question.
So no, unless you want to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial hump, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.
Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.
As a fellow Lemmy admin of a smaller instance, do you have any advice? Any resources that might be worth checking out?
Well, like I wrote below, it is basically about scaling Lemmy across multiple servers, with all the complexity that entails. I am probably not the best person to given advise on that though.
If our smaller instance ever gets to a size that is not feasible to run on a single server anymore, we will likely close registrations.
Thanks anyway. Personally I haven't been impressed either by the stability and performance of Lemmy. It is what it is I guess.