The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.

But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?

And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?

I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.

I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.

  • paholgEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    There’s nothing wrong with a monolith. Microservices are not inherently more scalable. Their advantage is around scaling teams. If anything, a monolith can be more performant as in-process calls are much faster thent network calls.

    • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      There can be better efficiencies by disaggregating the full stack into microservices and making IPC calls among scalable workers versus strictly service-per-server models which, yes, incur scaling issues from network iowait. Modern network operating systems do this, which allows heavier loaded processes more access to resources while lesser loaded processes are deferred.

      • paholgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        I’m not sure what you mean by a “network operating system”, but monoliths are inherently just as scaleable as services.

        Imagine you have a service architecture, and you are running 2 of service A, 4 of service B, and 8 of service C.

        Alternatively, you could be running a monolith on 14 nodes. Most of the work those 14 nodes will be doing work that would have been covered by service C, it’s just spread out in a different way.

        • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m talking about Cisco IOS-XR, Juniper JunOS, Arista.EOS and others.

          Those operating systems are disaggregated, meaning different features can be restarted, replicated, scaled out horizontally, or upgraded without having to disturb the other components in runtime.

          Maybe we’re getting at the same point from other ends. I’m not a traditional software engineer,but ai have had academic and professional training on these topics.