Initial Public Offer. Basically, the company going public on the stock market. They tend to try and look "shiny" before going public to make them attractive to buyers who want to make money from investing into the company.

In my experience (from working a place that has done this) they will do some waves of layoffs and make some operational budget cuts, as well as sometimes freeze some capex spending so the books look juicier. This includes things that may cause long-term harm, for short ish (under a year) gain.

Script is pretty similar with most companies that do this in tech, with predictable results.

Ahh here it comes. Expect more - IPO layoffs (from personal experience) are definitely a thing

In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we'll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit's costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

I mean, it's a message board. It's just unknown actors running the servers, but everything is public anyway so post accordingly.

Reddit was just controlled by a corporation is the only real difference.

I'm primarily watching from the sidelines and able to test things if needed for you guys, but I can definitely say this sudden influx is such a rare opportunity for us tech folks (SWEs and sysadmins) to get a real look at what breaks when you do a real load/soak test of a service.

Post-mortems are amazing for tech knowledge, so seeing it kind of "live" is even better.

Good job folks!

I'm guessing a lot of them all at once requires all the various CDN caches to be refreshed, so higher load on the database(s)

I fired up my own personal test instance so I can experiment with figuring out ways to reduce bottlenecks on the sysadmin/devops side - used to run the various PHP forums back in the day, so hoping to pass on some knowledge eventually.

I figure the toxic side(s) will gravitate towards instances that will tolerate their behaviour which is easier to deal with. Mods will be busy for a little bit though, and I wouldn't be surprised if registrations closed for a bit on some of the bigger instances so they can catch up if they don't just fall flat over on the heavy days. But, lots of smart folks trying to prep for this.

I've been happy with Bitwarden thus far. Used Lastpass back in the day, but migrated over when the renewal prices started creeping up.

Take a look at https://browse.feddit.de/

There's a auto-updating list showing even the popularity level - helps a ton finding them!

Current communities are popping up like crazy today and the previous couple days, so it's a bit to keep track of.

It's still a little unknown at this time what you need to handle X number of users, beyond a few hundred. Beehaw.org is pretty open about what they're using though in their financial statements if you're curious, but there's of operational optimization being tried out to see what'll help.

The stack is: postgres, pictrs, lemmy (Rust), lemmy-ui (nodejs), and nginx. RAM usage isn't too bad, but so far I see CPU and disk I/O (pictrs) as the limitation. Websockets are being removed which was another hurdle - would cause nginx worker threads to max out and drop instances off.

I'm on a 6$/month droplet as a reference for my single user instance and I'm subbed to a boatload of communities. So far I'm not having problems, but I made a 2GB swapfile for safety if RAM somehow spiked. CPU usage for me tends to spike when a community is being loaded for the first time due to image processing, but otherwise things are pretty idle.

Exacty. Even a couple thousand new users out of reddits millions make a huge difference

Probably restrict them more before IPO would be my guess

Admin-level moderation is getting quite out of hand I see.

Feels like 2000's message boards as I've said on a few posts now. It's nice - I do feel like my contributions matter more so I actually hit "post"

$. Plus, it's been awhile and the writers have loooots of material over the years to work with I'd think. Also sounds like the general cast/animators/writers have fun with making the show

It's a fraction of the work of an email server, if you're not keeping many users on it. Ie, my personal instance requires almost no work

That too! All boils down to the unexpected. Reddit back in the day was always crashing too, only really remember it being stable the past few years

This is also very true. Tech sector has been doing layoffs and admittingly these ones are pretty tiny in comparison to some other places, which is another factor why I think there will be more. And burning cash is quite true, which is part of why their investors are probably pushing hard for them to be ready for an IPO.

Running one on a 6$/month droplet. The TLDR is you'll definitely need a swapfile for spikes, but for a single user it'll probably work, though be a little slow to load communities for the first time. Mine is subbed to a huge amount of communities and so far the disk usage is nothing serious

The fact it's only so far a one season run makes me happy. Gives the writers time to actually have some fun with it - which is important since it has been so long.