I want Lemmy to succeed, I want to be optimistic about it as an alternative to Reddit, but OP is correct, and we need to be honest about this very simple fact:

The Reddit we knew and loved is gone, and that’s a sad, tragic thing, and there likely won’t be a 1:1 replacement for a long time, if ever.

It’s okay to admit to ourselves that this whole situation sucks, because it absolutely does. That doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy Lemmy and other federated things like it, and it doesn’t mean that federation doesn’t have advantages over Reddit, but let’s be honest: most of us were happy at Reddit, using our favorite 3rd party app (like Apollo), and we wouldn’t be here if the admins weren’t happy to kill what we once loved.

All we can do is try to make the best of it.

It's not just tech companies like Reddit and Twitter, it seems like it's most companies. Ever since the COVID lockdowns prices have been going through the roof, you get less for what you pay for, they're laying off workers, and all while raking in record profits while also crying about how no one wants to work and how they can't afford anything because of the economy. I've never been more cynical about companies than I have been the last year.

It's the enshittification of Reddit, as described by Cory Doctorow

What’s also interesting to observe is that the vast majority of the comments here have been respectful, considerate, helpful, and constructive. Maybe I got too used to the massive user base of children that Reddit had, and no hate for the younger crowd, but I did miss the maturity that early days Reddit had and subsequently lost.

Nothing at the moment, but I co-founded Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. I was Director of Operations there until I had to back away (health/medical reasons forced some pretty seismic shifts in my life). That was a rewarding and challenging experience!

The Internet, sadly, has always been an awful place for women and minorities. I hope we can build a culture here where that kind of shit isn’t tolerated, and all (sans trolls, bigots, racists, and Nazis) are made to feel welcome and respected.

Except the Dutch. Fuck those guys.

You should use this relatively quiet time to migrate to a larger server, because when the time comes where you need to do it, you're going to be in for a world of hurt. This is the calm before the storm--take advantage of it.

Ultimately, you need to scale horizontally. You need to shard your database and separate out your different functions (database, front end, whatever back end applications you use, etc) onto different servers, all fronted by load balancers. That's going to be the only way to even begin to handle increasing load. If you don't have a small team of experienced engineers with a deep understanding of how to build for scale, and you get a sudden mass exodus of users from Reddit, you're fucked. So if I were you, here's what I'd do:

1. Scale up to the largest instance type you can. If possible, switch (at least temporarily) to AWS and use something in the c6i instance family, such as the c6id.32xlarge. Billing for AWS instances is done by the hour, so you wouldn't need to pay for an entire month up front if you only need that extra horsepower for a few days (such as when the blackouts are planned from the 12th through 14th).

2. Because the above will do nothing but buy you time until you crash--and if you get a huge spike of users, without horizontal scaling, you WILL crash--migrate your DNS to something like Cloudflare. From there, configure workers to respond when health checks to your site fail, so that users attempting to access the site can be shown a static page directing them to something like http://join-lemmy.org or someplace, instead of simply getting 5xx errors.

3. Once the hug of death is over, evaluate where you stand. Reduce your instance size, if you can, and start investigating what it's going to take to scale horizontally.

I'm not a SQL expert, but I am a principal network architect, and my day job for the last 15 years has been working on scale and automation for the world's largest companies, including 7 years spent at AWS. In my world, websites like Reddit, as large as they are, are still considered to be of 'average' size. I can't help you with database, but I'm happy to provide guidance around networking, DNS, scale, automation, security, etc.

No, of course not, but the added…intentionality that it requires weeds a lot out. Remember, trolls usually go after that which requires the least amount of effort. So it’s not about being able to navigate a UI, it’s about effort.

Or maybe that’s just a bunch of bullshit. 4chan is pretty arcane from a UX perspective, and look at the cesspit that place is. I don’t know. It was just a thought experiment.

I wonder if this time we'll get a mugshot or perp walk out of it? Man, wouldn't that be something?

Going out especially is insane. I'm not terribly far off from Hartford, CT, and no matter where we go, if my wife and I go out just for two drinks total, one for each of us, we're not walking out of there without spending less than $25 or even $30. That's just fucking wild to me. If we want to have dinner--two mains, one shared app, one drink each--we're looking at at least $100 to $120, and that's just to any random place, not a high-end eatery or anything. And every single place will hand you a little Square thing or whatever with tip suggestions that start at 18% and go up to 25%.

I like that Lemmy and Masto don’t have those fucking algorithms. It’s a relief.

Fuck, City wining the triple is going to make me sick.

Agreed. This is depressing as hell. Apollo is a joy to use. There are so many niche communities on Reddit that I enjoy, and even if Lemmy or other federated things like it take off, those communities are largely going to die. This is a tragedy, no matter how you look at it. We are losing.

Speak for yourself.

…oh, wait. Shit.

Someone did, though there’s nothing on it now https://lemmynsfw.com/

I just made a text post thanking you for making this. I was hesitant to make a text post, but I thought you deserved my public gratitude for making this. Thank you!

I'll help with modding

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

Yes, I understand all of that. I know that it helps all the various instance owners. But that’s a problem that has already been solved. Building for scale is not specific or special to Lemmy. There are already entire automation toolsets—things like K8s or Docker Swarm, Terraform and Ansible, and endless documentation and examples on how to use and implement all of this. You’re talking about the greater whole, and what I’m trying to talk about is Lemmy.ml.

I do agree we’re probably talking past each other, though, and that’s alright, that’s how it goes on the Internet sometimes.

I want Lemmy to succeed, but I'm highly skeptical of the ability of the instance operators to be able to do so. There's a great deal of technical sophistication that is required to support a large number of users, and from what I've seen, they don't have it. This isn't a slight against them in any way, but they freely admit that they lack SQL expertise, and I think I've seen some significant gaps in their knowledge on how to horizontally scale. This instance, for example, is all hosted on a single virtual server. There are no load balancers, no database sharding, no fanning out of services onto different servers...security is as well also likely in a shoddy state.

Again, no hate from me, nothing but praise so far. But there are some significant technological gaps here, and I worry their team isn't large or technically deep enough to fill them. What's in place at the moment is just waiting to tip over when any amount of traffic starts coming over. For what it's worth, I have offered my expertise to the admins around networking, security, scale, and automation.

Movies, books, art, really anything related to horror. I really like the /r/horrorlit subreddit, but I think Lemmy is probably too small to fragment the different horror interests.

StokerCon is in just 10 days, so a lot of my friends and others in the horror community are buzzing about that right now. I’m attending and moderating a panel on AI, and I have a story in the Mother: Tales of Love and Terror anthology that’s up for Super Achievement, so much to be excited about!