this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Averrin to c/selfhosted
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Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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[–] deadcyclo 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not sure your second paragraph is correct. First of all, it's "just in time" so will only be replicated if somebody on that instance is following it. But more importantly, I read a statement from a server owner somewhere that the software purges older content regularly (and refetches is "just in time" when somebody tries to view the old content) to keep storage size down.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If this is the case, then wouldn't his fitst paragraph be incorrect also? Because if it is "just in time" with quick purging, the main server still has to constantly serve the instance server the content. It would only be beneficial if many instance users are trying to view the exact same content at around the same time (so for the "massive" communities maybe?)

[–] deadcyclo 4 points 1 year ago

From my understanding you are correct. Each instance is responsible for serving all of the content of the communities created on it. So many small instances with a smaller amount of communities = good, a few huge instances with lots of communities = bad.

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

The purging of older content is good news I didn’t know that.