this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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What?
People can subscribe to other instances or even host their own. If the majority of users end up on the same instance then what's the point of decentralization? Even worse if the traffic it generates for that instance makes it unstable.
Should the admin do nothing until the instance is mostly down with windows of uptime throughout the day?
A big part of the problem is that a new instance starts with zero database content and PostgreSQL performs fine with the way Lemmy organizes the data. But then there isn't anything for people to read, and search is only going to pick up local stuff.
There's no perfect solution but I certainly didn't move to a decentralized platform only to see it be intentionally centralized through inaction.
The quantity of users on Lemmy I still consider to be pretty low, the performance bugs need to be addressed on a big server. Bugs like not having a WHERE clause on an UPDATE hitting 1500 rows in a table (one row per server) instead of 1 single row... these need to be shaken out.
The errors of the overload themselves have been a way to throttle growth of the big servers. People were not able to insert new posts and comments into Lemmy.ml - reducing outbound federation activity too, and they went to other servers. This went on all of June and July.