The post lagging seems to be front end only. So far I’ve had no issue simply refreshing the page when it hangs.

Yeah. I’m in the same boat. My SQL skills aren’t impressive either since there are other people at work that handle optimization. Haven’t used rust either (yet) so cannot really contribute there either. Though I’m considering potentially starting work on a cross platform mobile app. I haven’t worked with mobile apps for a good six or seven years, so I feel like it’s high time I get back up to speed. (But knowing me, I’ll end up making something half finished and the start procrastinating)

Yeah. But horizontal scaling (well horizontal scaling in a system like this where you need clustering so the instances talk to each other) is hard. And I think there are a lot of other things that need to be polished, added and worked on before that. It would probably also need somebody with knowledge of clustering to start contributing. I think step 1 needs to be that the dev team needs more help properly tuning the database use. The database is very inefficient, and they lack the skill to improve it:

We are in desperate need of SQL experts, as my SQL skills are very mediocre. ^{https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877}

So getting help improving the database is probably the #1 thing that can be done to deal with the scaling problem.

Thing is, lemmy doesn’t support clustering/horizontal scaling. So there are limits to how much increasing you can do. You can beef up with a database cluster, add a separate reverse proxy, and increase the specs of the hardware lemmy is running on (but hardware can’t be expanded limitless), but that’s about it. Once you hit the limit of what a single instance of the lemmy software can handle, you cannot scale anymore. Pretty sure you will hit the limit long before you reach thousands of dollars.

I mean it’s the same on reddit, just that they have to have slightly different names.

I’m pretty sure that duplicates will sort them selves out organically over time.