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How will lemmy scale?
(lemmy.world)
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I think there's a benefit to the push model, as the instances can prioritize who to push to first if there's scaling issues, instead of having to throttle GETs, effectively the end result is anyway the same that nothing ends up to other instances in real time (which is fine). I don't know how lemmy works exactly, but could the push model just be a detail of activitypub https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/what-happens-when-you-honk ?
It definitely is part of the ActivityPub protocol, but I only glanced at the spec so far. I should probably follow that link and implement a toy ActivityPub app to get more familiar with how it works.
The downside to this is smaller instances are penalized in that scenario, which would in turn could cause users to flock to megainstances until it becomes centralized again.
As I said, GETs are cacheable, so if one slaps Cloudflare in front you can handle millions of GETs for relatively cheap.
Maybe it's batched however? I really need to read the spec. Pushing to thousands of servers every 1/5/10 minutes certainly would give a fair amount of headroom to make it work I guess.