SemioticStandard

That’s not how this works. Lemmy itself may be open source, but the instance it runs on is not. All the work in work in the world on the Lemmy codebase won’t mean anything if its actual deployment is not built for scale, and that’s not anything anyone but the admins can do anything about.

I want Lemmy to succeed, but I'm highly skeptical of the ability of the instance operators to be able to do so. There's a great deal of technical sophistication that is required to support a large number of users, and from what I've seen, they don't have it. This isn't a slight against them in any way, but they freely admit that they lack SQL expertise, and I think I've seen some significant gaps in their knowledge on how to horizontally scale. This instance, for example, is all hosted on a single virtual server. There are no load balancers, no database sharding, no fanning out of services onto different servers...security is as well also likely in a shoddy state.

Again, no hate from me, nothing but praise so far. But there are some significant technological gaps here, and I worry their team isn't large or technically deep enough to fill them. What's in place at the moment is just waiting to tip over when any amount of traffic starts coming over. For what it's worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.

That's Kojima for you. But agreed, the game felt like someone took far too much inspiration from qwop. I've heard it called a 'walking simulator,' which feels apt, lol.

spy on all the traffic

That's...not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won't attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you're going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you're going to fail when load starts to really increase.

You should use this relatively quiet time to migrate to a larger server, because when the time comes where you need to do it, you're going to be in for a world of hurt. This is the calm before the storm--take advantage of it.

Ultimately, you need to scale horizontally. You need to shard your database and separate out your different functions (database, front end, whatever back end applications you use, etc) onto different servers, all fronted by load balancers. That's going to be the only way to even begin to handle increasing load. If you don't have a small team of experienced engineers with a deep understanding of how to build for scale, and you get a sudden mass exodus of users from Reddit, you're fucked. So if I were you, here's what I'd do:

1. Scale up to the largest instance type you can. If possible, switch (at least temporarily) to AWS and use something in the c6i instance family, such as the c6id.32xlarge. Billing for AWS instances is done by the hour, so you wouldn't need to pay for an entire month up front if you only need that extra horsepower for a few days (such as when the blackouts are planned from the 12th through 14th).

2. Because the above will do nothing but buy you time until you crash--and if you get a huge spike of users, without horizontal scaling, you WILL crash--migrate your DNS to something like Cloudflare. From there, configure workers to respond when health checks to your site fail, so that users attempting to access the site can be shown a static page directing them to something like http://join-lemmy.org or someplace, instead of simply getting 5xx errors.

3. Once the hug of death is over, evaluate where you stand. Reduce your instance size, if you can, and start investigating what it's going to take to scale horizontally.

I'm not a SQL expert, but I am a principal network architect, and my day job for the last 15 years has been working on scale and automation for the world's largest companies, including 7 years spent at AWS. In my world, websites like Reddit, as large as they are, are still considered to be of 'average' size. I can't help you with database, but I'm happy to provide guidance around networking, DNS, scale, automation, security, etc.

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

That's helpful to think of it that way, thank you. Perhaps I will reconsider :)

I'm interested in getting into this, but I think I'd probably end up abandoning it and having it feel like a chore, then feel guilty about not getting it 'done.'

I’m glad you enjoy it :) They’re following what Red Hat is doing because they’re intended to mimic precisely RHEL. We used to say that Rocky is a “bug for bug” mirror of RHEL. So they have no choice but to follow suit.

No, of course not, but the added…intentionality that it requires weeds a lot out. Remember, trolls usually go after that which requires the least amount of effort. So it’s not about being able to navigate a UI, it’s about effort.

Or maybe that’s just a bunch of bullshit. 4chan is pretty arcane from a UX perspective, and look at the cesspit that place is. I don’t know. It was just a thought experiment.

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.

Movies, books, art, really anything related to horror. I really like the /r/horrorlit subreddit, but I think Lemmy is probably too small to fragment the different horror interests.

StokerCon is in just 10 days, so a lot of my friends and others in the horror community are buzzing about that right now. I’m attending and moderating a panel on AI, and I have a story in the Mother: Tales of Love and Terror anthology that’s up for Super Achievement, so much to be excited about!