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?
Every server just has a cache … there is no profit for the whole network …
I wouldn’t say that caching is no profit. Yesterday there were several times when lemmy.ml was struggling or effectively down for some people, but despite complaints over there I could read lemmy.ml communities just fine through my instance. Caching meant that I was isolated from the service interruption, and the lemmy.ml server was isolated from my contribution to its load.
As I said, there is no profit from empty instances. Of course, the federation itself is good and fail-proof in this way. But if nobody asks for this cache, it’s just an Internet Archive of a sort.
It only takes one user for an instance to not be empty. Every bit of decentralisation adds resilience to the whole.
But more decentralisation adds more resilience, so let’s try to spread out the communities and users.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.
Rules:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it’s not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
I wouldn’t say that caching is no profit. Yesterday there were several times when lemmy.ml was struggling or effectively down for some people, but despite complaints over there I could read lemmy.ml communities just fine through my instance. Caching meant that I was isolated from the service interruption, and the lemmy.ml server was isolated from my contribution to its load.
As I said, there is no profit from empty instances. Of course, the federation itself is good and fail-proof in this way. But if nobody asks for this cache, it’s just an Internet Archive of a sort.
It only takes one user for an instance to not be empty. Every bit of decentralisation adds resilience to the whole. But more decentralisation adds more resilience, so let’s try to spread out the communities and users.