Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.
I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?
Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?
I mean that my account, with the username
PriorProjectis hosted on the instance calledlemmy.world. So that instance is "home" for my account. When commenting on a community like[[email protected]](/c/[email protected]), the home instance for that community islemmy.ml, and I'm relying on federation between those two instances to shuttle posts/comments back and forth so I can see them and people on other instances can see my comments.If you were confused because we were discussing "home labs", I confusingly used "home" in a different way. I don't mean that
lemmy.worldis hosted out of my house (it's hosted on a cloud provider, and I have nothing to do with running/hosting lemmy world... I just happened to sign up for an account there), I mean that instance is the home for my account. I probably could have found a clearer way to say that initially, but the ambiguity didn't occur to me till you just responded.It's worth noting that it's possible to overtune a federated network on single-user instances as well. The advantage of a shared instance is that servers hosting communities can replicate posts/comments from that community to a server, and that server can handle browse traffic for hundreds or thousands of users. If each one of those users instead ran their own single-user instance, the server hosting the community would have to work much harder to deliver hundreds or thousands of copies of those posts/comments... and if some users went inactive but left their lemmy server running... maybe nobody is even reading those posts.
It definitely IS possible to overtune a federated network both for too few servers that are each too big, and too many servers that are each too small. There is a goldilocks zone of a medium number of servers that are medium in size. But Lemmy is a long way from too many single-user instances (the devs have commented that replication traffic is not a bottleneck), and there's also a lot of tuning they can do to make large instances run smoothly. So Lemmy has room to both host bigger servers, and more of them.
Thanks for the comment! That cleared it up. Great to know that running a single-user instance won't hurt Lemmy. I kind of wish the developers would have gone for
k3sinstead of Docker to self-host Lemmy but I suppose that's fine for now.