This summer in Missouri is terrible. We’ve had some light rain here and there, but only for a few minutes that a time and it’s been that way for months. Dry as a bone here. Chances of rain constantly and most of it never materializes.

Even “just text” as a sufficient scale introduces significant technical challenges. I’m sure some of Reddit’s resources go to deal with ads and some scraping of user data, but even just the basic user experience at the scale of Reddit takes thousands of servers… and that was back in 2018 when Reddit’s infrastructure team did an AMA. I’m sure it’s grown substantially since then.

Back then, on average, Reddit was sending out 32 gigabytes per second to support all of the users connecting. That text, at Reddit scale, becomes incredibly substantial.

And as you grow beyond single server capability, you get into clusters, load balancing, availability, consistency, and all kinds of other things that pop up to make a single application like Reddit operate at the scale it does.

More instances may also introduce more database consistency issues. It all depends on how the application scales. It it’s designed to scale out, might be fine.

Understood on scaling instances, but even those instances will eventually outstrip a single server’s capabilities. In considering the question as to whether or not Lemmy can replace Reddit, the question really comes down to how well and seamlessly Lemmy can scale.

In a lot of applications, scaling beyond a server introduces what can be some pretty gnarly complexity around things like database consistency between nodes, and things like that. I’m sure Lemmy can handle that to a point by spawning new instances, but, right now, they depend in users having sufficient awareness to even know how to do that whereas Reddit’s sign up experience is pretty streamlined.

All of this is solvable, but at some point, someone will ask the question, “who is going to pay for this capacity?” and we’ll be back in a place where we have to either decide whether o pay a monthly fee, support ads, or see or data sold. Infrastructure and people to support it are expensive.

There will also ultimately be legal compliance needs (GDPR, CCPA, etc), tax compliance as a monetization model - even if it’s just to cover expenses- is established.

I do want to see Lemmy succeed, but there will be a lot of reality to consider eventually.

I don’t know a lot about lemmy.world, but it seems to be running on “a server”. The person that wrote this may have used it as a simpler way to mean “the overall infrastructure that runs lemmy”.

However, if it really is “a server”, there will eventually be a breaking point where continuing to scale gets a lot harder, more complex, and more expensive. A lot of people don’t really understand that a site like Reddit has a massive infrastructure as its foundation. That’s how it can handle millions of connections, billions of comments, and stay - more or less - available.

It’s expensive to run.

Lemmy can’t ever hope to replace Reddit without some kind of significant investment in infrastructure and possibly development. If the code isn’t written to support scaling out (as opposed to scaling up and just throwing more RAM, CPU, and storage at a single system), it can’t replace Reddit.

That’s not to say that I’m not loving Lemmy. I do. I have barely opened Reddit since Friday after apollo died. At some point, though, money will become a factor here as well.