Aside from the usability learning curve he talks about, the other very pointed criticism is scalability problems that instance owners face. From what I understand, Lemmy and Mastodon are both similar in that they use the ActivityPub protocol. Could Lemmy get too big to scale and still be decentralized?
As long as we make it clear to users “you can interact with content on other servers independent of your choice” and recommend instances in a way to distribute load, I think we can manage.
Something like recommending instances based on location or main content focus could also help.
The author is directly saying that the more instances you have, the higher load on each of them. Because they’re all replicating and sending traffic to each other. Then again I don’t know enough to verify that, and Lemmy seems to be working just fine for me for the past week.
There are technical ways to solve this. If we can identify some way for instances to determine users’ interests and allow instances to query based on interests, that can reduce load. We can do all sorts of caching to reduce load even further.
It complicates the system, which is a risk, but it leads to a better user experience and better performance.
We just need the right people with enough time and desire to implement these kinds of technical solutions.
Guess it’s time for me read the ActivityPub spec.