Random picture I took some days ago at the beginning of the expedition just because of the colors
The upvote jumping is caused by issues with the websocket implementation. As far as I heard they are going to get rid of websockets completely in the next version and have static page rendering instead.
Yeah. But horizontal scaling (well horizontal scaling in a system like this where you need clustering so the instances talk to each other) is hard. And I think there are a lot of other things that need to be polished, added and worked on before that. It would probably also need somebody with knowledge of clustering to start contributing. I think step 1 needs to be that the dev team needs more help properly tuning the database use. The database is very inefficient, and they lack the skill to improve it:
We are in desperate need of SQL experts, as my SQL skills are very mediocre. ^https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877^
So getting help improving the database is probably the #1 thing that can be done to deal with the scaling problem.
Thing is, lemmy doesn't support clustering/horizontal scaling. So there are limits to how much increasing you can do. You can beef up with a database cluster, add a separate reverse proxy, and increase the specs of the hardware lemmy is running on (but hardware can't be expanded limitless), but that's about it. Once you hit the limit of what a single instance of the lemmy software can handle, you cannot scale anymore. Pretty sure you will hit the limit long before you reach thousands of dollars.
I mean it's the same on reddit, just that they have to have slightly different names.
I'm pretty sure that duplicates will sort them selves out organically over time.
I disagree with your statement that centralization is almost a law of the universe. Anything big online these days is decentralized, it's just done transparent through CDNs, so you as a user don't notice as opposed to the fediverse where it is visible to the general public.
Not only do we not need to attract everyone, we cannot attract everyone. At least not short to mid term. If everybody on reddit suddenly jumped on the lemmy bandwagon, the whole network would go down faster than you could blink.
From my understanding you are correct. Each instance is responsible for serving all of the content of the communities created on it. So many small instances with a smaller amount of communities = good, a few huge instances with lots of communities = bad.
I'm not sure your second paragraph is correct. First of all, it's "just in time" so will only be replicated if somebody on that instance is following it. But more importantly, I read a statement from a server owner somewhere that the software purges older content regularly (and refetches is "just in time" when somebody tries to view the old content) to keep storage size down.
Had almost the same journey, except I've never heard of fark before.
I agree. I too prefer the website as a progressive web app. Though I'm playing with the idea of making a cross platform app highly inspired by relay for reddit. But with my history of procrastination that probably never will get finished.
It probably boils down to what costs the most, making a universal model for everywhere, or making a European model and a separate "screw you" model for the rest of the world.