I’m registered on the main instance (https://kbin.social/).

They are heavily overloaded, the dev already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month), but that only helped at the beginning, now that some are saying to join kbin instead of lemmy (because of lemmy devs apparently being tankies), the server is essentially close to dying. This is also an issue with some lemmy instances, earlier today I was unable to reach feddit.de.

> already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month)

No judgement on you or the dev using "as high as possible" here, I realise it could be a simplification in this instance.

However, I have seen a fairly strong pattern of fediverse servers being run by people with relatively few skills in system administration/web apps/operations/etc. It seems like there are a lot more people who are engaging with it on the same level as people renting multiplayer game servers, or installing Wordpress on a consumer-focused VPS provider.

And I think this is kinda great. I want the fediverse to be accessible at that level or even below! It does lead to issues like this though.

67 euros per month is a small server, and a single server is not the best way to run a service that other people are using. It's different when it's your personal site, but a social network?

I think the fediverse needs to figure out whether it wants to focus on making smaller servers easier or bigger servers easier. It's fine if most people are on million-user servers with teams running them, and it's fine if most people are on family servers that can go down without much negative impact, but this middle ground where people are on ~10k sized servers that individuals without the necessary skills are struggling to keep running on a volunteer basis seems to be a bad middle-ground.

Honest question ... How far can you push "one server"? Given that HN runs on one server (plus one mirror) and this apparently serves a not that small community well ... Given "1 million connections" are possible on one server ... Given that green threads are a thing these days ... Given that SQLite is so much faster than networked databases ... Given that a monolith is faster than Microservices ... Given that it's possible to use a compiled language instead of trying to speed up interpreted languages ...

What's the limit here? HN is a great example of what's possible, but can a single beefy server scale to handle the traffic of a Reddit?

But if you like the idea of ignoring best practices, there are EC2 instances with 192 vCPUs that go for several thousands an hour. And taking as example Golang benchmarks https://github.com/smallnest/go-web-framework-benchmark where it's not uncommon to be able to serve 6 digits of 30ms requests per second with just 4 cores. Then the conclusion is, the limit is the sky, if you are stubborn enough.