I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this. I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
Some things can go faster if you add more workers, some things can only go faster if you make the workers bigger or faster .
If you’re tidying a garden you can get it all done more quickly, and tackle bigger gardens, by getting your friends to help. That’s horizontal scaling.
If you need to get a parcel from your house to Burkina Faso the only way to do that more quickly is to use a bigger, faster machine. That’s vertical scaling.
The way Lemmy is designed right now (says the op, I don’t know the detail) you can only support more users by making the server bigger and more expensive, not by using lots of smaller servers.
Edit: note that Lemmy as a whole scales horizontally: more instances == more users, but each instance has to scale vertically.