How do server upkeep costs look like for fediverse stuff?

mishii9029@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 50 points –

I'm pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?

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Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update

Wow, such transparency... that's awesome. I wonder (hope) if there will be a massive spike in donations in June.

/me sets alarm to remind me to donate after work since I keep thinking about it while I'm away.

Ya, no kidding. This piqued my interest, but I did not click expecting to see an actual cost basis! I have been looking at potentially setting up my own node, but at the same time... Perhaps contributing here, financially as well, could be the best option.

Still fun to play around with my own stuff though :) Thanks guys!

He is a Dutchie, that must be why.

I guess so.

I have a small, private Lemmy site, a personal Calckey site, and some blogs that I run off of a VPS that I pay like $13/month for. The server is overkill by an order of magnitude for what I'm using it for. Based on current usage, I could support a few hundred active users without ever taking a dime from anyone, though I'm sure media expenses don't scale well. That said, there are collective media projects like Jortage out there that have the potentially to significantly reduce media hosting costs for small sites.

This sort of openness and transparency around finances and the need for donations should become the norm (however awesome it is to see from ruud).

IMO, with more transparency, the more normal it will seem to donate and the less grating it will be to ask for donations.

Don't forget to consider donating to developers of lemmy and/or your mobile app of choice!

How is it possible to donate?

Opencollective has a page. Recurring donations are usually more useful than one-time, but both are excellent.

Just reading through this it seems crazy to me that lemmy.world is being scaled vertically, is there something about how it works that prevents horizontal scaling (like, load balancing across a number of servers all using the same db)?

As far as I can tell, the software just wasn't built with that in mind, so I would expect some kind of bugs or weird behavior like race conditions, etc. Nothing is stopping anyone from trying it to see what happens though I guess.

I am trying to start a project with a fairly ambitious goal, trying to take load off the central instance to reduce hosting costs (whether that comes in the form of a single powerful server or multiples pointed at the same DB). It's still in early form, but the core (trying to make it so running a Lemmy node is not too punishing on the main instance server) is an attempt to do the engineering to help accomplish exactly this.

From what I understand, Lemmy is just using a PostgreSQL database, and there's many ways to load balance and horizontally scale it. You could use something like HAProxy for load balancing, and for horizontal scaling, you could add multiple PostgreSQL slave nodes and if you want to manage the scaling automatically, you could use a tool like ClusterControl or w/e. There's plenty of doco on the web around this and it's not specific to Lemmy.

You can scale app servers surprisingly far before you need to shard a decently sized single master postgres cluster. Like, probably 20-50+ times the current write traffic it seems this instance has. It was probably due to the websockets thing, thinking about it. With 0.18, that goes away and requests can be stateless, cached, and you can throw a load balancer and n app servers at it.