• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle







  • Rust itself or the way the Rust logic is implemented is not the bottleneck. Like most decent web applications the bottleneck is the database and how the decentralized protocols themselves are reconciled there.

    Scaling massive amounts of records like Lemmy has been forced to is almost always IO bound at the database level even when a web service is centralized; this is much more difficult in federated architectures. This is why “NoSQL” databases have increased in popularity, but they are also not a magic bullet as there are major ACID trade offs one needs to consider.




  • I definitely do find this a little disappointing as I think the Lemmy community is too small at the moment to create unnecessary divides and schisms. Success in my mind is predicated on many communities from Reddit coming to servers and forming a common denominator community that achieves critical mass.

    It’s clear to me that some of the communities on the 2 you are defederating from you instance have become more popular and are already the defacto “place to be” for certain subreddits.

    All that said, I’m happy that my main server (infosec.pub) has not unfederated from those 2 instances so I am able to still participate on those 2 servers AND interact here on my “main” account. This lets me get the best of both worlds. It’s very exciting to see the Lemmy model working in that regard!




  • Yeah I definitely agree – you summarized my feelings nicely.

    I would also add that as exciting concepts/technologies grow and commercialize they tend to become more subject to noise and self-interest interfering with some of their higher order “platonic” (ideal) forms. I fundamentally think that the more federated/decentralized a service can be, the better its original purpose and perfect form can be maintained. Practically I do think it’s challenging for both currency and link aggregation to be properly decentralized, but I think both Bitcoin and Lemmy are inherently beautiful implementations if you strip them down to their core.


  • I mean I definitely agree that this feels great, but decentralization and federation is what pure Bitcoin and crypto are all about. In many ways this community reminds me of the good vibes and great minds the early days of cryptocurrency discovery encouraged. This predated some of the corruption, VCs, and crypto bros that came around in 2013 during the first boom.

    I still think that early soul of empowerment and community is there in Bitcoin itself but you gotta dig a little deeper to find it. I expect Lemmy will also “commercialize” to some extent in coming years, but it’ll always be better than Reddit and other centralized platforms that want to feature gate and censor unfairly.