The post is from 2 years ago but it does pose an important question which few people really talk about. The Fediverse isn’t scaling.
Any distributed system is inefficient, for one, because it lacks the economy of scale.
Sure, it’s probably worth the tradeoff, but what happens when we actually get so many people that servers start to collapse? Lemmy has ~45k active users, but let’s say we jump to 1 million active users. Small servers will stop working due to too much traffic, medium servers will need way more money to process the thousands of images per day, large servers will become too centralized. We’re already slowly going that way with the instance count steadily going down and users/instance going up.
None of this matters now but within the next 5, 10 years I think we really need a game plan in order for these platforms to succeed. You can’t just increase the servers to spread the load, the load on all instances is steadily going up.
Cyberpunk is a good example of gorgeous raytracing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pkuU0cGQu8
The problem is that proper raytracing is way too heavy for most machines, so game devs don’t bother. The Cyberpunk example on max graphics would need an RTX 4090 just to run it over 60fps. No point in pushing tech that nobody can run yet.
Raytracing on older games looks great because they already weren’t intensive to run, so developers can get away with maximizing raytracing while still running fine.