This site is currently struggling to handle the amount of new users. I have already upgraded the server, but it will go down regardless if half of Reddit tries to join.
However Lemmy is federated software, meaning you can interact seamlessly with communities on other instances like beehaw.org or lemmy.one. The documentation explains in more detail how this works. Use the instance list to find one where you can register. Then use the Community Browser to find interesting communities. Paste the community url into the search field to follow it.
You can help other Reddit refugees by inviting them to the same Lemmy instance where you joined. This way we can spread the load across many different servers. And users with similar interests will end up together on the same instances. Others on the same instance can also automatically see posts from all the communities that you follow.
Edit: If you moderate a large subreddit, do not link your users directly to lemmy.ml in your announcements. That way the server will only go down sooner.
Is there anyway to scale an instance by adding more nodes? Not be adding additional instances, but more of a distributed load balancing for a given instance? What about migrating communities to a different hardware instance? What scaling challenges does Lemmy face that something like Mastondon doesn’t?
I’m sure there are many folks (myself included) who have technical resources that are not community builders. I’m sure if there if there is a way to spread the load, enough folks want this to succeed to make it work.
This comment further down states that the main issue is with the heavy JOIN-laden SQL queries that build the pages; the queries get long enough that pages time out.
Load-balanced frontends for lemmy.ml would hit the same backend/DB, as I understand it, so spinning up a frontend won’t necessarily help with the load. What’s needed is someone who knows pgsql optimization, and that’s not me. (I might be able to help if it were MySQL…)