this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023

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130

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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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[+] halictuz@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amen on matrix. Federating with most popular rooms on matrix.org basically brings my server to it's knees for a week trying to play catch up between federating users and their profile pictures and decrypting years of chat history. On my first go I made the mistake of trying to join #matrix:matrix.org and I had to wipe the entire server clean to get it back.

[–] sam@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Check out matrix 2.0 on youtube. It looks promising.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

> Because you can still access all content no matter where you are.

If you know how and want to do it. Unfortunately, it isn't the way how most people think.

[–] apolinariomabussy@lemmy.calvss.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And fortunately, there's still time for people's minds to change. Federation and decentralization are things that aren't really advertised or mainstream yet so people still don't have a clue what it is. However, we do know how those things work, so I guess it's kind of up to us to help people know about how said things work.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd like to help with this improvement. Do you know any plans for it? Honestly, looks like that there is no "lemmy committee" and even lemmy's developers cannot organize something like this. Any ideas?

[–] zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nothing good can come out of a federation committee. Invite whoever you want wherever you want and give a little bias to smaller instances, and it should balance itself out.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dont suggest adding a centralization =) I see two possible and actionable directions:

Create tech solution to balance load through available resources
Spread the word that there are better ways to spend your money and passion helping lemmy. I know, my "engineering manager" bias tends to see process problems in places where are no problems. But I dont want to see how the awesome idea is dying because of lack of basic management and foreseeing.

[–] ericjmorey@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm confused about what you want. Why should I care about lemmy.ml being over run because they didn't put enough resources into their instance?

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because we are here because of content, made by users. I'm thinking about whole "lemmy-verse". If users encounter issues, they just stop using the service. You as an instance owner can choose to not participate. But if somebody already thinks rhat they helps, why not use it?

[–] Ataraxia@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I'm getting plenty of content. Not sure what the issue is.

[–] Amby@dataterm.digital 1 points 1 year ago

It’s kinda the same issue that some games have, like MMOs. People tend to make new accounts on the biggest and overloaded servers because there is the most activity even though stability could be an issue, or login queues.

It's funny you mention MMOs, because FFXIV has a system that i'm now realizing feels like federated websites.

You have your home world(server) where your character was created and is stored server side, but you can matchmake within your data center as well as visit other servers in your data center.

And then you can also temporarily transfer to different data centers (though the implementation is clunky and has a few restrictions)

[–] zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And all major chat rooms are hosted there too. That's not how matrix works. Rooms are fully replicated to all participating servers, no single server acts as a point of failure. It also has a resolution system for divergent states; no server has authority over any other. You can add local aliases for any room you're in on your local server without permission from room admins. (... Actually I'd have to doublecheck that. It might be one of the permissions.) You don't even need an alias, the room ID (eg. !BZVTUuEiNmRcbFeLeI:matrix.org) and a server that's currently participating in the room (ie. has that room ID) is enough to join. That's really what aliases are; mapping a name to a room ID on a particular server that is known to be participating. Room IDs include a server name as an anti-collision mechanism, it has no other significance.

It feels like 95% or more are on matrix.org instance. I think it's a bit lower than that. midov is actually pretty big. So's T-AC. (And then there's joe's room directory, which I think is bigger than morg's.) But it's well over 50%, which is disgustingly high. morg should close registrations, and purge dormant accounts/aliases.

a weekly cap for new registrations as an option Extremely good idea.

like MMOs. Funny you mention that, I had a laugh on Witch Weapon when I discovered that my server was frequently getting 10-100x more points in ranking events than other servers (and I was frequently placing top 50 without any of the busted characters). I'd simply chosen the recommended server, which I had assumed was the smallest at the time. Turns out it was just a static value so it had like 50x the population of the other two.

I still miss that game.