Given the general Lemmy guideline that users should avoid posting more than 5–10 times per hour in a single community (to prevent flooding the overall network), would it make sense for Lemmy to implement some kind of Hourly Post Counter?
For example, a small indicator that shows how many posts a user has made to a given community in the past hour—like “3/10 posts this hour”—maybe visible when posting or on your profile.
Perhaps have it so that if users go over the limit, they get an error message.
It could help users stay within the community norms, especially since Lemmy doesn’t have as many active users as Reddit, and frequent posting can have a larger impact here.
Do you think this is a helpful idea?
Or would it just take up space?
Would love to hear your thoughts.
While the issue of the inter-server protocol being overly chatty is very much real, putting the burden on the users isn’t a good solution.
The focus should instead be on improving the protocol itself and its implementation with better algorithms, batching, etc. I’m not super knowledgeable about the inner workings, but I feel like there’s still some relatively “low hanging fruits” in the protocol design (are activities properly batched? are they sent as linear broadcasts to all federated instances? could we use some alternative broadcast distribution, like binomial? etc) and implementation (is the data model leading to some expensive operations? are the SQL queries well written? could we speed them up some other way?).
I say this as someone who’s been running an instance for many years now, and can tell you for sure it has been a rather bumpy ride, as a small server. Running a good and fast server with lots connections is not cheap; not as much as it should, at least imo.