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/
Federation also does a lot of live HTTP connects to other peers. It looks up users for messages. The whole design is very resource intensive, one single vote, comment, post at a time. There is also a lot of boilerplate JSON overhead in sending something as simple as a single vote.