this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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@rglullis I think the donation model is working ok at this scale, but I don’t believe it will scale up to the hypothetical future we were discussing on the show where the fediverse became the social media platform for the masses. There are somewhere around 1 to 2 million active fediverse users, depending on how you count. If that were 100x or 1000x larger, we would simply crumble - I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage that we end up paying for across various instance) and generally, people who use social media are far less concerned with the core value propositions of the fediverse, like privacy and whatnot. I know that’s hard to accept, but we’re here because that’s how we think. So no, I don’t think we will have a future where a 500,000,000 active user fediverse can be operated off of donations from members. I also very much doubt that people would pay a fee to be here when corporate social media alternatives are “free” to them
That's my hunch too, although haven't studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?
I suppose this community is as good as any. But it's difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I'm not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?
Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it's good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer 'hot', and folded away ... Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.
Well, that's the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy's and Reddit's style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It's a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don't get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that... you don't get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P
"New comments" sort helps with that
Sort of, but doesn't it just sort by the latest comment? I.e. any thread would be bumped to the top by a single comment? I might be wrong. But that makes it kind of less than ideal if true.
That's indeed how it works (and that's I was able to see those comments).
It works for me, how would you like to have it differently? IIRC on old school forums a single message would also bump the thread
Yes, but that doesn't scale. If there are thousands of comments being submitted constantly, the All feed would just be a new page every time you refresh for the new comments sort. It would be chaotic.
It should instead be based on a recent rate of comments for instance. Much like normal votes but comments instead and not based on the age of the post.
Piefed partially solves that with multicommunities
That way you can follow your hobbies feeds, your tech feed, your art feed separately.
For All it would indeed be messy.
Yea it's still only a partial solution. Even those feeds could get very active over time (we can hope 😅). The way Piefed implemented feeds is interesting but seems almost overengineered? Sharing feeds could have been done via a simple query parameter I feel like.
Feeds can be personal, so you can decide how granular to you want them. So far I'm able to follow every conversation on the different topics I like, so I would say it works quite well so far.
They can be public too, but personally I prefer to customize my own.
"New comments" sort helps with that