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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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A network of (“thousands of”) servers has — like most things — pros and cons.

Some of the pros are:

  • The network is more resiliant against outages. If lemmy.ml is down, all other users can still access the network.
  • It's hard to take legal action against the network or to buy it out (like Big Players™ like to do to get rid of potential competitors).
  • It allows various similar or even conflicting moderation policies. The network, i.e. the infrastructure doesn't allow or prohibit any specific opinion (the communities do).
  • It allows for different ways to pay the bills: goodwill of the admin, donaitions, ads, fee or selfhosting. The latter also allows great control over the data so you control your privacy.

Some of the cons are:

  • Content is replicated across servers, which increases the total amount of data stored.
  • Latency and speed suffer.
  • Interoperability with the wider Fediverse is less than 100%, which can create confusion and frustration.
  • Discovery is more difficult.
[–] Averrin 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah, and this post about how to use some (a lot of) servers that are doing nothing to participate in "pros" while the top 20 of servers are suffering from these cons.