this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Are all these thousands of servers useless? (self.fediverse)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Averrin to c/[email protected]
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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 andthe 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. 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] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Isnt the problem mostly that most people dont spread out to other instances, and thats why you dont get the benefit from being distributed?

I mean, right now its a bit silly seeing people sign up for the most overloaded instances and ignore the ones with low amount of users. It should be exactly the other way around to maximize the value to the community.

In fact, to really benefit growth of the entire network, popular instances should stop accepting new users so they spread out on other instances by default.

There are literally only pluses being on a small instance: much better performance, no latency, no timeouts... and still you can subscribe to anything. What are the advantages of having an account on a big overloaded instance? I cant see any advantage personally. In fact, it will give new users a bad first experience.

[–] Averrin 6 points 1 year ago

There are two points:

  1. Instance owners aren't ready to be a community manager and moderator. Also, a big instance costs much more. Many people just want to pay their 5$ in month and passively make their contribution.
  2. Not all users are "power users". They want to consume content. To make federation successful, we should provide a smooth UX. Balancers, meta-account, something like this. Smart enough to require only one click and utilize all available resources.
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The problem is that in order to understand how the system works you have to use it first. Now if you are one of the people running away from Reddit, it's natural to try to find the most popular server that provides most content to scroll through because that's how it it used to work.

It also doesn't help that join-lemmy.org highlights active users per month as a metric even though in the end it shouldn't matter at all.

[–] WalterzarBoBalterzar 4 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. Having grown up with MMOs in the early 2000s I honestly thought I needed to pick the biggest most active instance akin to chosing an active game server 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yup. I signed up for Lemmy.ml before I realized that. I think it'd be really helpful if the instances set a cap on number of users, so theat when you went to join-Lemmy.org and saw that beehaw has 1.9k users OUT OF 2k, then it'd be more likely to sign up for a different instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I was surprised to see that myself. I guess one thing that is easier for new users is that local communities will just show up on their instance under Communities, and they dont have to add them from other instances. I can see the advantage of that I guess.

But it would be a shame if all these new users end up on the top 5 instances and just make them full and overloaded, and then the users will complain about bad performance and technical issues with Lemmy. Its a completely self-inflicted problem. :)

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

There are literally only pluses being on a small instance

You just never know when a small instance will go away, causing you to lose your account, subscribed communities, posts, comments, etc.

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

Smaller instances are more likely to be abandoned/shut down, which currently means you lose your account.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure but does it matter? You are supposed to be pseudo anonymous here, so switching accounts now and then is only a good thing in my opinion.

So you have to resub to your communities and you lose your posting history.

But this is not reddit. You are not supposed to build up karma on a account, and stay with it for years and years. :)

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

Even if I accept that for Lemmy (which I don't), Lemmy isn't the only app in the Fediverse. With something like Mastodon, you build followers; starting over is not a good thing. And Mastodon users can follow Lemmy users (and Kbin users), so you could still lose followers even if you're primarily on Lemmy.

[–] mikehunt 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Being able to host a mirror of an existing instance for load balancing would be cool. It would allow us who have available resources to be able to contribute without the hassle of setting up and moderating an entire instance.

[–] Averrin 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, this is exactly my point. But I suppose a lot of people think that starting new instance is enough. But, unfortunately, it isn't.

[–] Dee 6 points 1 year ago

It's still fairly new, hopefully that's a feature that can be prioritized and added soon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Do you know how to make this mirroring as seamless as possible?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure that there isn't a mirror feature and I think it's not a trivial one to add

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