In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
Maybe your disk is too slow, or latency between Lemmy and Postgres is too high?
It is a k8s cluster and using ceph for all of my storage so the latency from that I bet is the largest reason and upping the memory offsets the disk writes. i also have another postgres DB syncing as a fallback for high availability. Fortunately after tuning the database and giving it enough RAM my instance has been running pretty stable for over a year without any changes.
I am also using less powerful computers for the entire infrastructure (not server grade) which brings to the point of having horizontal scaling on database I imagine will be a growing need with growing instances, communities, and users since it can be cheaper to run multiple smaller spec servers rather than a single with the added benefit of high availability.
Postgres supports sharding which should work without any changes in Lemmy. But so far not even lemmy.world needs that. There are also read replicas which would require support directly in Lemmy afaik. Such a feature will surely be added as instances grow bigger over time and need more resources.
I didn’t think of using read only replicas, that would probably be a very good way to go since its probably 80%+ of actions are reads. Thanks for answering, I am excited to see the how lemmy grows and thanks for all the devs hard work!