Selfhosted

I asked ChatGPT to do that for you :)

So I made this forum to work on one specific piece of software that I think could benefit Lemmy (and the overall fediverse community) substantially. I’ll lay out what I want to make and why, in some detail.

I apologize for the length, but I can’t really do this without some level of support and agreement from the community, so hopefully the wall of text is worth it if it resonates with some people and they’re swayed to support the idea. If something like this already exists please let me know. I looked and couldn’t find it, which is why I’m making this extensive pitch about it being a good idea. But, if it’s already in the works, I’d be just as happy working on existing tech instead of reinventing it.

The Problem

In short, the problem is that you have to pay for hosting. Reddit started as a great community, just like Lemmy is now, but because it was great it got huge, which meant they had to pay millions of dollars to run their infrastructure, and now all of a sudden they’re not a community site anymore. They’re a business, whether they like that or not.

Fast forward fifteen years and look how that turned out. I think this will impact Lemmy in the future, in very different ways but still substantially. It’s actually already, at this very early stage, impacting Lemmy: There are popular instances that are struggling under the load, and people are asking for donations because they have hosting bills.

Sure, donations are great, and I’m sure these particular load problems will get solved – but the underlying conflict, that someone who wants to run a substantial part of the network has to make a substantial financial investment, will remain. Because of its federated nature, Lemmy is actually a lot better positioned to resist this problem. But, it’ll still be a problem on some level (esp. for big instances), and wouldn’t it be better if we just didn’t have to worry about it?

The Solution

Basically, I propose that all users help run the network. Lemmy is a big step forward because a lot more of users can help than before, but even in Lemmy, only a small fraction of people will choose to make instances, and you’ll still have big instances serving lots of content.

I propose to make it trivially easy for the end-users to carry the load. They can install an app on their phones, or a browser plugin, or run something on their home computer, but they have absolutely trivial ways to use their hardware to add load capacity. The load on the instances will be way reduced just from that option existing, I think.

I would actually argue for taking it a step further and having instance operators be able to require load-carrying by their users, but that’s a choice for the individual operators and the community, based on observation of how this all plays out in practice.

One Implementation

It’s easy to talk in generalities. I’m going to describe one particular way I could envision this being implemented. This proposed approach is actually not specific to Lemmy – it would benefit Lemmy quite a lot I think, but you could just as easily use this technology to carry load for a Mastadon instance or a traditional siloed web site. It’s complementary to Lemmy, but not specific to it.

Also, this is going to be somewhat technical, so feel free to just skip to the next section if you’re just interested in the broad picture.

So like I said, I propose to make peer software that provides capacity to the system to balance out the load you’re causing as an end-user. The peer is extremely simple – mostly it runs a node in a shared data store like IPFS or Holepunch, and it serves content-addressable chunks of data to other users.

You can run it as an app on your phone if you have unlimited data, you can run it as a browser plugin (which speeds up your experience as a user, since it’ll have precached some of the data the app will need), you can run it on your computer back at home while you access Lemmy from the road, etc.

The peer doesn’t need to be trusted (since it’s serving content-addressable data that gets double-checked), and it doesn’t need to be reliable or always on. The system keeps rough track of how much capacity your peer(s) have added, and as long as it’s less then your user has consumed, you’re fine if your peer goes away for a couple of days or something.

When you, as a user, open your Lemmy page served by the instance, what you get served back is tiny: Just a static chunk of bootstrapping javascript, a list of good peers you can talk to, and a content hash of the “root” of the data store