They are heavily overloaded, the dev already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month), but that only helped at the beginning, now that some are saying to join kbin instead of lemmy (because of lemmy devs apparently being tankies), the server is essentially close to dying. This is also an issue with some lemmy instances, earlier today I was unable to reach feddit.de.
No judgement on you or the dev using "as high as possible" here, I realise it could be a simplification in this instance.
However, I have seen a fairly strong pattern of fediverse servers being run by people with relatively few skills in system administration/web apps/operations/etc. It seems like there are a lot more people who are engaging with it on the same level as people renting multiplayer game servers, or installing Wordpress on a consumer-focused VPS provider.
And I think this is kinda great. I want the fediverse to be accessible at that level or even below! It does lead to issues like this though.
67 euros per month is a small server, and a single server is not the best way to run a service that other people are using. It's different when it's your personal site, but a social network?
I think the fediverse needs to figure out whether it wants to focus on making smaller servers easier or bigger servers easier. It's fine if most people are on million-user servers with teams running them, and it's fine if most people are on family servers that can go down without much negative impact, but this middle ground where people are on ~10k sized servers that individuals without the necessary skills are struggling to keep running on a volunteer basis seems to be a bad middle-ground.
I do wonder what the funding model is supposed to be for the large servers. Tiny servers can be funded out of pocket, but large platforms can't, and the resource requirements of fediverse apps seem to be much higher per-user than those of a centralized platform.
(I'm not sure if the resource requirements are inevitable or just a sign of an immature app.)
I am glad I have no data limit though - I apparently went through >3 terabytes (split 30/60 between up and down) last month alone, mostly due to Plex and Wireguard.
Currently this leaves a lot to be desired. It sorta works for status-based updates with Mastodon and a few others, but it's not a great situation as Mastodon isn't the most standards compliant player, and the standards themselves are pretty loosely defined.
My eventual plan is to host my own 1-user instance and rely purely on federation.
I wonder if this has the same issue.
> Lemmy uses roughly 150 MB of RAM in the default Docker installation. CPU usage is negligible.
[0]: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration...
It was fun but that was insane.
The negatives all just became positives, or at least drivers towards the positives.
Once you get to 3 postgres nodes, 2 LB's for the DB traffic, then Front ends with Load balancing, you are looking at 9 servers-ish minimum....
That monthly cost even in Linode is a bit more than I would be willing to front with no compensation.
That said, i may just setup an instance of kbin I can control and rely heavily on the federated portion to interface with the various communities. If my understanding is correct, I can access other lemmy instances even with kbin, such as beehaw etc.
What's the limit here? HN is a great example of what's possible, but can a single beefy server scale to handle the traffic of a Reddit?
But if you like the idea of ignoring best practices, there are EC2 instances with 192 vCPUs that go for several thousands an hour. And taking as example Golang benchmarks https://github.com/smallnest/go-web-framework-benchmark where it's not uncommon to be able to serve 6 digits of 30ms requests per second with just 4 cores. Then the conclusion is, the limit is the sky, if you are stubborn enough.
... do you know me? ;-)
Combine that with the ability to actually throttle a physical server (ie you only pay what you actually use, not per hour) ... I guess I would propose the following scaling strategy:
1. get cheap physical server 2. get your software up and running 3. get a second physical server that is roughly twice as capable 4. use that second server as a "beta" and development server ... do a lot of profiling there 5. once your real world usage spike on the first server routinely reach 80-90%, switch production over to the bigger server 6. get a new development server that is twice as beefy as the former development server
For those interested: right now the largest instance I see is a u-12tb1.112xlarge (448 vCPUs, 12 TB RAM, 100 gb networking) which is ~$109/hr on demand or $40-80/hr with a 1-3 year commitment. This works out to ~$29k, ~$58k, or ~$79k per month.
If you don't need 12 TB of memory, there's a 6 TB instance for roughly half the cost.
edit: physical server that is
Not to forget the data transfer costs though https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ And also the potential minefield of API GW and NAT costs.
For anyone else wondering wth a “tankie” is.
It does tend to be true that all 20th century Marxists were and remain tankies, I was raised by such and have family friends who think Putin is awesome and it's fuckin embarrassing.
But I am a Marxist in the economic sense and also believe the USA is still a pretty good bet.
Of course, we are all still carrying around child slavery in our pockets, most of us. It's got a shiny touchscreen and it helps us find our way around, through the power of child slavery.
The above paragraph is me being a Marxist.
So you're right but I think people know what's meant.
So did communist states have capitalist governments then? Is this boiling down to "real communism has never been tried" again?
Authoritarianism does not know a political stripe. Before 1917, the government of Russia was a self-identified autocracy with a god-given right to make Russians live how Russians have mostly always lived.
The worker's movement that took that down instituted a thing they called communism, but which was really just the old system with different uniforms and modernist art. Not that efforts were not made, and not that the old guard in the rest of Europe didn't take steps, but it was mostly that the revolutionaries didn't really know how to operate a ship of state, so they fell back on old habits and kept the branding.
It ended up as a collectivist nightmare, and it still had a privileged class at the top, but there was no ideological conviction that capital was a positive force which could do no wrong, so no, they did not have a capitalist government, and pejoritavely calling it communist is fair IMO, I think communism is a thing that could be done but which won't, in a just way, in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It can be done badly and people keep trying.
I'm a 30s-style socialist, myself. I think the New Deal was doing well and Americans could have had a nice country all this time, but I dunno, everyone wants to roll those dice and be one of the upper class instead of demanding justice now.
There's plenty of USA-hating anarchists who aren't being called tankies. The authoritarianism is a pretty important part of the term.
Though this isn't entirely incompatible with what you said, the major non-US geopolitical powers have historically been nominally socialist, and also happen to be authoritarian; so people who support non-US-aligned powers will have been supporters of the USSR or China, and I'm comfortable calling those people tankies.
So I'd define it more as primarily someone willfully ignorant of genocide and other appalling human rights abuses with a mild preference for an economic system.
If you step into the tankie mindset for a moment, you will zoom in on the book banning and anti-trans cudgel that's currently getting swung around, and they will contextualize that with our 400 year history on this continent, and pretty rightly conclude that there is no moral champion at the nation state level, and if there is, it cannot possibly be America, but if they're here, America is the one they are able to fight.
Likewise, if you step into a naive geopolitical viewpoint and say to yourself that Russia is a country that lost the cold war and which the West did not really help to become more democratic in the aftermath - you sent your capitalists and that equated to sending freedom, in the minds of Reaganized America.
But Capital does not concern itself with anyone's freedom but it's own, and Capital does business with anyone willing to do business with it, including its morally-liberated, and now ideologically-liberated, former rivals, who were never fucking communists in the first place; they were the new autocrats, same as the old autocrats, and likewise, Yeltsin was just a drunky thrown up there to give speeches while they reestablished control under the new capitalist branding.
And for thirty years, mostly anyone who question it has been shouted down. "These are our trading partners and they're totally super into freedom, guys! China wants to be like us!"
And here we are. But anyways, rant aside, to the tankie and to the book-banning Christian Fascist alike, the enemy has lost all moral status, they are outlaw, and therefore any measure used against them is just, no matter how inherently unjust it might be in and of itself. As long as it's used against them.
This is how "good" people like you and me end up joining the organizations that end up living in infamy, whether it's my sainted grandmother who went to her grave believing Stalin was fine or whoever ends up as the evil poster boy for the current attempt at Christian Fascism that Barry Goldwater was already warning yall about.
If he had leaned into it like Trump did, he would've brought this all on much sooner, and we would be dealing with some other calamity here in 2023, but Goldwater called it, these people believe in apocalypse as a good thing, so all of us who are right-thinking, whatever economics we may favor, are gonna have to get on the same page about this one.
It's extremely telling to me that the mainstream right-wing view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is one which supports Russia -- in perfect alignment with the tankies.
A curious irony is that the 45th POTUS once characterized Putin's decision to invade as "genius".
Actually I take the above as further evidence that the usual projection of political thought onto a single left-right axis remains hopelessly reductive.