I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.

My presumption was that there was some robust but efficient network of servers that aided cache and data retrieval.

As you say, data synch seems to put a decent load in all servers which grows as the network does. Seems like a problem that’s been kicked down the road. As you say.

[–] Carighan 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.

Well... KISS is a good concept for a reason. There's on paper no reason - at least before running into actual issues - to find something fancier than just replicating updates across known other network members.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oh I know. But by 2022 the Fedi had been running for years so I’d figured something fancy had at least become necessary by that point. How much of a problem it is I don’t know but I’ve definitely heard that the load of pushing out all the sync has been significant for some servers, lemmy instances included during the migration. And then there’s the storage costs, where that’s probably a much smaller problem but might come up at some point not far down the line??