I only know of two FOSS federated alternatives to reddit which is lemmy or kbin.
I think lemmy will scalebmore being written in rust were kbin is written in PHP.
And by scaling I am refering to high user count, high traffic, server resoures, server cost.
Yep, there’s a reason database admin is a career of its own. We use MySQL at work but same deal everytime: monitoring goes crazy and we poke the devs to fix their queries.
Been meaning to get familiar with Lemmy’s code soon, just need to find some free time 😅