Fediverse

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.

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.

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.