If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

  • RagingNerdoholic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    2 years ago

    That’s definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It’s basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it’s associated with goes down with it.

    It’s a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.

    • Deebster@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?

      • wagesof@links.wageoffsite.comEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on [email protected] it can merge with [email protected] and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.

        Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.

        • JustinAEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          That sounds really smart. Let communities decide which instances they federate with. The mod team owns the community, not the instance admins.

      • HexTrace@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Definitely need some kind of replication/mirroring to occur between instances for DR, I was looking at how other decentralized systems for inspiration. Something like RAID where it’s tolerant of one or two drive failures could be translated to Lemmy. When you set up a new instance it allows you to opt-in to a peer network where you host backup content from several other instances and your instance is backed up to several other (non-overlapping) instances.