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In terms of chat community Matrix seems like the best option since there's mechanics built into Lemmy to interact with it nicely (for example you can add a matrix profile to your account and then people can click a send secure message button when they view your profile to message you on matrix)

Discord does have the most users though

The database knowledge required for the things relating to databases most likely extends way past what I know but I would be willing to help out as an instance admin to keep things running. Ive got some social medias linked in my Lemmy profile if you wanted to check my history

I'm not really a fan of Discord, so something else would probably be preferable, but whatever it ends up being, I'd really appreciate it if, whatever it is, I could create an account without an email, or even better, if I could just read what's going on without having to sign into something.

May want to consult this selfhosted community about managing a lemmy server: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted

I used to work as a senior linux sysadmin for some webhosting/datacentre before i go back to education to do my engineering degree. So i may be able to give a hand in that direction.

I'm not a DBA, but I love Postgres, so let me know when I can help with anything.

Let's try a discord first so that we can at least connect and figure the rest out -> https://discord.gg/T4PjRWSa

Nowhere near as experienced as some of the users here, but I use Rust and databases on a daily basis for work. Would be willing to learn if there is a need

I would like to suggest XMPP for the community chat. Federated+standardized protocols that are practical to self-host should be priorities in a world were lemmy is viable and makes sense. In this area XMPP is much friendlier (in admin, in complexity, in resource-usage) than the alternatives.

I also happen to have experience running ejabberd clusters for a couple communities and can offer some amount of sysadmin help would it be wanted. Another interesting aspect of XMPP is that there are efforts underway to federate with the fediverse, so we could probably enable chatting over XMPP with lemmy accounts and vice-versa at some point.

I suggestion that someone create a shell client stress-test app for the server API. Do a login, do a listing of postings, do a listing of communities, access a user profile, access a posting with 10 comments and another with 150 comments, etc.. Measure the response time and output it in a simple format that different admins can share and identify slow areas within the lemmy_server code.

The problem seems to be rooted in the lack of generating enough dummy test data for the lemmy-server app... it was only incrementally tested with low activity that was on the Lenny network before May 2023... now it is 100x or more data in the comments, upvotes, users, etc.

Each new comment and posting is making servers slower, the SQL is jut not scaling with the current table structures and JOIN usage.

Not familiar with most of tech needed to run a lemmy instance, but I'd be glad to help with simpler stuff like digging through email.

I'd be glad to help out where I can. I have plenty of infrastructure background, so I can help with emails, backends, some database stuff, and other admin needs. I'm not familiar with VPS, but have worked on enough platforms I'm sure I can be of service.

I added my profile here to my linktree, so that you can see I'm a real person. https://linktr.ee/mdowst

I would be happy to help out with instance admin stuff, if you still need help. Some examples:

• https://www.reddit.com/user/twwilliams
• https://twitter.com/twwilliams
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/twwilliams/

Happy to help however I can! No experience with Rust, but have been doing backend web stuff for quite a while. I'm comfortable with friend stuff as needed as well as Postgres. Also just happy to help with admin things as needed.

I shortly looked through the source code for Lemmy, and it's using a Rust ORM named Diesel. I don't know Rust at all, but it seems like in order to add the ability for pgbouncer, two things would need to be done.

1. There would have to be separate environment variables for a direct connection to the database, to run migrations. Prisma (an ORM for Node.js, which I am more familiar with) does something similar: https://www.prisma.io/docs/data-platform/data-proxy/prisma-cli-with-data-proxy#set-a-direct-database-connection-url-in-your-prisma-schema. From my understanding, pgbouncer is essentially a queue for the database. So if you have a bunch of things in the queue, it will delay your migrations from running.
2. Once step 1 is completed, the regular database environment variables can point to the pgbouncer connection pool. Based on the pgbouncer documentation: PgBouncer acts as a Postgres server, so simply point your client to the PgBouncer port.

Like I said, I don't know Rust but I would be interested in learning it if I have time. Or maybe someone else in the open-source community could work on this. There's no specific issue for adding pgbouncer support, but there's an issue about slow SQL queries that mentions it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2877

I'm willing to help out in any way I can to make this happen.

I, for one, would also prefer Discord.

I get the whole "decentralize ALL THE THINGS" mindset is common, and in certain ways I support it — but not all of us have the spoons to deal with each and every federated service! Hopefully a mainstream one is at least usable for most folks, and requires the least effort-aside-from-that-already-necessarily-being-spent-to-participate-in-the-Fediverse. 😅