It’s very difficult for a volunteer run operation to scale up at short notice. The same time Lemmy has to if it wants to capture disaffected Reddit users.
Lemmy should grow at a sustainable pace. The population boom from the blackouts is transient. As the moderators on Reddit get less enthusiastic about doing free work for a company that clearly doesn’t like them and will happily take away their tools, some will give up. The communities there will get less well taken care of, eventually users will notice, and there should be a slow trickle out. That’s the sustainable stream Lemmy should try to capture.
Or none of this will happen and Reddit will go back to normal, in which case fine, who cares, right?
Source: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_a...
This isn't two people working on it on the weekend as a hobby project that got too much attention during an unforeseen event.
Rather, it is two people who worked on it as a full time job (no other sources of income) from grants for three years (with funding running out this year).
For a rough estimate, one would expect about 10,000 hours have been put into the project (2 people, 2000 hours a year, 2.5 years).
It is less of a hobby project than Minecraft was in 2012.
Load _testing_ is easy.
The problem is to handle load, and cache invalidation is _extremely_ hard.
And the team behind Lemmy didn't exactly get much notice either, so they might not have even tried to get stuff to scale well.