this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Lemmy
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All of your points only considers the community itself, which is not my argument. And that can already achieved by just doing Vertical scaling like most instance currently do, I think even lemmy.world just using 32 core now (google cloud can possibly run with more than 200 vCPU).
I'm mostly approach this from technical standpoint. It's impossible to have 100% uptime if there's no horizontal scaling capability. For example on updating version, currently the instance will need to shut down for maintenance until it's finished and usually there's still some issue to fix. If horizontal scaling exist, the instance can update server (or add additional one), move the traffic a bit to test it, and then fully rollout if everything going well.
I understand. But the point I am trying to make is that makes no sense to worry about technical issues now. Not only it is a premature optimization, it is the kind of metric that is actually damaging to us.
What do you prefer? A server that can handle hundreds of thousands of users with 5 nines of uptime, focuses on "Web Scale" and ends up replicating all the issues from Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/Reddit, or an instance that is more aligned with the ideas of the SmolWeb and that is more likely to be a net-positive force in your life?
Not to mention a hardware failure, which could take a couple of hours to fix at least, some mental health communities should stay online at all time, someone mentioned there is research showing when a person is suicidal there are a couple of hours he is vulnerable, and there is some research showing online support can improve mental health.