With forewarning about a huge influx of users, you know Lemmy.ml will go down. Even if people go to https://join-lemmy.org/instances and disperse among the great instances there, the servers will go down.
Ruqqus had this issue too. Every time there was a mass exodus from Reddit, Ruqqus would go down, and hardly reap the rewards.
Even if it’s not sustainable, just for one month, I’d like to see Lemmy.ml drastically boost their server power. If we can raise money as a community, what kind of server could we get for 100$? 500$? 1,000$?
The advantage kbin has is that it is build on a pretty well known and tested php Symphony stack. In theory Lemmy is faster due to being built in Rust, but it is much more home-grown and not as optimized yet.
That said, kbin is also still a pretty new project that hasn’t seen much actual load, so likely some dragons linger in its codebase as well.
I think it’s probably undesirable to end up with big instances. I think the best situation might be one instance that’s designed to scale. This could be lemmy.ml or another one. It can absorb these waves of new users.
However it’s also designed to expire accounts after six months.
After three months it sends users a email explaining it’s time to choose a server, it nags them to do so for a further three months. After that their ability to post is removed. They remain able to migrate their account to a new server.
After 12 months of not logging in the account is purged.