this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2021
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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In the sign up process, it discourages using the primary srever. In the docs it talks about performance limitations. In contast Mastadon does not do this. Worse yet, most people think of a single centralized server. And this server only has some 500+ active users a month. Maybe 10 times that many lurkers?

While I love the Lemmy design, and the community looks great, I fear that it does not scale. Worse yet I suspect that the Activity Pub protocol is grossly inefficient for Reddit style applications. Maybe a publish subscribe message broker, like MQTT would be much more efficient.

So what is gong on here. Is this an issue? Am I correct to be scared about Lemmy scalability.

And just for context, I think you are totally on the right track, way ahead of all ofther reddit clones, but maybe just a little off course. Can you crank up performance?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 years ago (7 children)

Mastodon will struggle to live on a 1GB RAM system, like most cheap VPS. I host one instance (single-user though) on a ROCK64 with 4GB of RAM, and it takes around 1GB. Lemmy on the other hand takes right around 100MB of RAM, also single-user instance. I guess Lemmy's developers prefer to stay on the safe side and encourage people to make use of federation as much as possible.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 years ago (3 children)

Lemmy is written in Rust while Mastodon is written in Ruby, this likely explains the differences in RAM usage.

Maybe CPU/Disk will scale worse on lemmy because each page loads a lot of comments, while on Mastodon you rarely load more than a few toots at once.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 years ago

I used to host a mastodon instance for just one user, me. It really struggled unfortunately in both speed and space requirements.

I wish they had an option to block all bots from the platform. I can block individuals and instances, but bots would still pop up like crazy.

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