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If everyone was spread out onto different instances, and communities were based all over the fediverse, the decisions of one instance would be less impactful.
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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3 words SINGLE USER INSTANCES
The amount of data that needs to be exchanged because of this approach is not scalable. Assume that there are 3 instances with 100 users each. Even if lots of users upvote/post/comment, the traffic is exchanged only between 3 servers. But if there are 300 single user instances, the amount of traffic/storage will be duplicated which can cause a huge load for everyone which might not be viable in the long run, for both the sender and receiver. PS: I am assuming that the instances periodically update content by fetching the deltas.
That's incorrect, so far no batching is set up for sending multiple posts at once and the exchange is initiated by the sending server, not the receiving server.
Just go to your average big popular subreddit, check out all the text of all posts and comments they week. That's still a minuscule amount of data. A few megabytes when uncompressed.
And Lemmy won't get to that point of popularity and traffic for a very long time.
And even then, it's an easy problem to solve. Each instance creates a chunk of a day's data, sign it and share it on a bittorrent like protocol. Even nntp massively archaic infrastructure can manage this, it is a piece of cake for Lemmy to do.
IPs change constantly, MAC is per network device (a laptop with Wi-Fi and wired has two different MACs), so you would need to be able to have a list of MACs and MACs can be easily spoofed so thats a whole other set of issues.
Another interesting thought about MACs and any other chip-based IDs that get floated in the future. Spoofing aside, while MACs are supposed to be unique, there are a lot of dodgy mfgs that just burn the same MAC or set of MACs into entire batches of chips at a time. If a new standard was announced, it would be interesting to see the results of orgs trying to take advantage of the ID while shady mfgs continue to not give a flip.
The vast majority of ethernet devices can be set to use any arbitrary mac address
MACs are "supposed" to be unique identifiers baked into the network chip, so it's partially a matter of how hard they work to make any other IDs spoof proof.