The ActivityPub protocol lemmy uses is (in my opinion) really bad wrt scalability. For example, if you press one upvote, your instance has to make 3000 HTTP requests (one to every instance that cares).

But on the other hand, I recently rewrote the federation queue. Looking at reddit, it has around 100 actions per second. The new queue should be able to handle that amount of requests, and PostgreSQL can handle it (the incoming side) as well.

The problem right now is more that people running instances don’t have infinite money, so even if you could in theory host hundreds of millions of users most instances are limited by having a budget of 10-100$ per month.

So far it doesn’t seem like any company actually wants to compete in this space (longer-form somewhat text-focused communities). Even reddit is trying to become more twitter and less reddit.

I agree that it’s not ideal to be hosted on a platform controlled by Microsoft, but it’s just a fact that you lose 90+% of contributors if you are anywhere else (there’s an article where someone compared, can’t find it right now). It’s not great that that’s how it is, but you need to choose your battles.

I’m not really very concerned, since git itself is decentralized, and if Github starts causing visible problems moving somewhere else is not a huge problem. Also VPNs exist.

There is a ton of decentralized projects that no one has really ever heard of, new ones pop up all the time (I was watching multiple of them in the past). Sadly in most cases it seems like most authors stop working on their projects after a while.

The same ideas have existed for a long time but both decade old projects (ever heard of Freenet? Probably no) and new ones . Many of them are very ambitious and try to replace huge swaths of things (not just file storage but also social aspects, web of trust, etc) but then collapse under the complexity. IPFS is the most well known new project and (good imo) has limited its scope, but sadly (still) suffers from huge scalability issues, some of which are deep in the design.

I think it’s really hard to align incentives there - the nicer it is the harder it is to make money with it. So either these projects tend towards control by one entity or they tend towards death.

Really the only one that seems to have a long lasting life so far is torrents. Which are amazing. And Email if you want to count that.

Personally I came with them so I guess they are my people ;)

I don’t think it’s that large. Text is very small and compressible compared to images. Well it depends on if you mean the actual database storage (uncompressed, with indexes) or a compressed copy of all the posts. You can see the post number in the URL, which on lemmy.world for this post is 11169622. That means there’s around 11 million posts total in lemmy.world’s database. If you assume each of them takes 0.5kB of storage that would be only ~ 5 GB of posts.

I don’t think we found any specific groups of people attacking Lemmy. I personally just saw one or two what looked like individuals trying (and succeeding) to take Lemmy down with a few very simple requests that forced Lemmy to do lots of compute (something like fetching the next million posts from page 10000). The fixes for those were simple because it was just missing limits checking.

I’m not sure if there actually was a larger organized attack. Lots of performance issues in Lemmy simply appeared simultaneously and compunded each other with a rapidly growing number of active users and posts.