this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Are all these thousands of servers useless? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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 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. Is there any "balancers" to utilise these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with a such fast growth?

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[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 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.

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 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. :)

[–] TheButtonJustSpins@infosec.pub 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.

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 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@lemmy.world 2 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 😅

[–] UrbenLegend@lemmy.ml 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.

[–] mikehunt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.