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.
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.
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.