[londons_explore]

To be fair, load testing is hard to get right. Plenty of well resourced and smart teams screw it up, and have outages due to scaling issues.

And the team behind Lemmy didn't exactly get much notice either, so they might not have even tried to get stuff to scale well.

[distcs]

Exactly! And also keep in mind that all of this is open source created by volunteers like you and me in their free time. Imagine you and me working on a side project like this during weekends. We will probably be focusing on implementing the protocol right, fixing all those rendering and mundane CSS issues, making sure the login and session management does not have security holes. Essentially get all the functional stuff right. And one day Reddit makes some crazy announcement which drives hoardes of people to our little project. Pretty sure we'll not be prepared enough to deal with scaling issues due to the sudden influx of new users.

[balder1991]

Just some more info, they were working on Lemmy full time.

Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...

[littlestymaar]

Yeah, the two of them…

[shagie]

Its a matter of setting the expectation of involvement.

This isn't two people working on it on the weekend as a hobby project that got too much attention during an unforeseen event.

Rather, it is two people who worked on it as a full time job (no other sources of income) from grants for three years (with funding running out this year).

For a rough estimate, one would expect about 10,000 hours have been put into the project (2 people, 2000 hours a year, 2.5 years).

It is less of a hobby project than Minecraft was in 2012.

[afavour]

All of what you’re saying is correct but so is what the OP said.

It’s very difficult for a volunteer run operation to scale up at short notice. The same time Lemmy has to if it wants to capture disaffected Reddit users.

[bee_rider]

Reddit is still in the process of making bad moves I think; unless I missed something and they announced a reversal of the API pricing changes?

Lemmy should grow at a sustainable pace. The population boom from the blackouts is transient. As the moderators on Reddit get less enthusiastic about doing free work for a company that clearly doesn’t like them and will happily take away their tools, some will give up. The communities there will get less well taken care of, eventually users will notice, and there should be a slow trickle out. That’s the sustainable stream Lemmy should try to capture.

Or none of this will happen and Reddit will go back to normal, in which case fine, who cares, right?

[balder1991]

I feel like the population boom was enough to enable a few communities to settle in Lemmy and now they’ll grow more organically. So far I’m enjoying the quality of posts there, it’s definitely a situation where quality over quantity makes sense.

[red-iron-pine]

honestly strikes me as a HN sorta thing where there is a small group of motivated and technically savvy types. noise-to-signal ratio is pretty good, and overt or covert 'hailcoporate' sorta stuff is not especially common.

[thatwasunusual]

> To be fair, load testing is hard to get right.

Load _testing_ is easy.

The problem is to handle load, and cache invalidation is _extremely_ hard.