Why is Lemmy so much faster than reddit?

More athletic hamsters and we keep the wheel well lubricated.

looks under desk and pats the Dell Optiplex server

This gave me a chuckle. Lol

Because Lemmy isn’t running a thousand tracking scripts, and they’re not intentionally making the mobile website barely functional to push you to an app where they can track even more.

Reddit is running on a potato.
Lemmy is running on several distributed potatoes, with a much smaller user load per tuber (and many orders of magnitude less bots).

Probably all the ad tracking shit running in the background.

Not to mention the IPO has them cutting costs everywhere to make them look profitable.

I also wouldn't put it past them to intentionally slow down people who aren't logged in.

I'm pretty sure Reddit used to be profitable. There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day's Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day's server costs. When I first started using Reddit, it'd typically be about a third of the way full when it reset, but a few years after the at, it was filling up after about eight hours, suggesting they were covering the server costs three times over, which should have left plenty of money for staffing costs as they didn't have many staff back then. Eventually, they got rid of the bar. Later, they did things that would have increased costs, like hiring people to make New Reddit and the Reddit App, and hosting images and videos themselves instead of leaving it to imgur, and I guess these were enough to make them no longer profitable and force them to aim for faster growth.
- There used to be a bar on the right-hand side that showed how far each day's Reddit Gold purchases had gone towards covering the day's server costs.
  
  There were always people costs too, and plenty of others. Breaking even on infrastructure doesn't stop the bleed of the venture capital. And investors do expect a return.
- I totally forgot about that gold meter for server costs.
  
  I miss that Reddit.
- There was corpo phrasing in that...
  
  It was amount of gold equal to server time assuming all the gold was bought.
  
  But mods would get a shit ton to give out. And towards the end when you got gold you got "coins" as well that could be used to give gold.
  
  Like, say I want to make "Fun Time bucks" a thing. To drive adoption I'm going to give out free fun time bucks to everyone, they spend because it's free, and people start seeing it as valid.
  
  Reddit was pumping gold so people saw it and hopefully they bought it because they assumed everyone else was buying it. But most of it was "free" gold.
I know for a fact they have wait() code in there. If you try to do anything on a thread the OP has blocked you, it takes 10s or so minimum.

It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.

My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.

old.reddit.com has always loaded quickly, except their self hosted photos and videos, which is a (relatively) new thing and has never loaded fast.

... And also Eternity is uber cool!

Eternity was already based when it was a Reddit app. Hopefully it will see mbin support soon™.

Much smaller user base, distributed servers, modern code (versus reddit's ancient code), less enshittification in the code (reddit's various manipulative algorithms).

Eh, the code is very inefficient.
It's probably down to how much random crap is being loaded along with what you're trying to see. The modern web means page load takes forever, in part because of all the random things your browser also has to pull down. Some of this content need to be loaded before you can render much of anything and some of that will result in calls to yet more random servers. Look at the network tab in your browser's dev tools to see what I'm talking about. Without an ad blocker you're probably looking at calls to 10-20 servers just to load a webpage.

The old reddit API was actually pretty snappy, in part because it didn't need a lot of this overhead. I suspect the same is true for Lemmy - no extra fluff.
- And distributed over more than a thousand nerd servers :-)

I think this is instance dependent. Midwest.social is super slow for me frequently and times out a lot depending on the time of day.

It is certainly instance dependent, as they would all be running in different servers.

Unrelated but does Eternity correctly support Links now? (to comments / threads)

This drove me to Jerboa, but I prefer Eternity's UI so I'd be pleased to go back if that's fixed.

The app is still broken. I still have it installed and it has some really annoying quirks. I use voyager and it's solid.

You may just be connecting to a server that is much closer, there are also more smaller servers for a much smaller client based too. People who host these servers are usually in the IT community and probably hella overspecd the server vs userbase size too. Lemmy is also an open source project that has a lot of eyes to solve and fix issues

probably hella overspecd the server vs userbase size too

properly specd by ensuring that the system could handle spikes in activity.
- That's pretty well what I was getting at, IT peeps have a brain usually

Lemmy doesn't have any code in it whose only purpose is to maximize profit (e.g. code for showing ads) but isn't necessary for functionality. Also, the decentralized nature means that any given instance has to serve only a subset of users, not all of them like reddit does.

There used to be reddit.com/.compact . It was lightning quick to load and browse even on load end devices because its wasn't graphics/javascript heavy. When reddit removed the ".compact" view it was the first thing that made me look for an alternative. The API changes was another.