The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.
The apps are already amazing and will not suffer issues of scale themselves because they run on users’ devices. The scaling issues will be in Lemmy server code and ActivityPub in general.
ActivityPub doesn’t seem very scalable IMHO. It works well if all instances are about the same size and communities are well-distributed. Right now a few servers like lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and lemmy.ml are much larger than others. They host most of the popular communities as well. This creates an imbalance which ActivityPub doesn’t handle well.
I think Lemmy instances should be topic based. But that’d be confusing for people coming from centralized social media who are only trying to find a reliable starting place. So I really hope we reach a point of maturity and mainstream-ness of Fediverse that people feel comfortable with smaller theme-based instances.