Correct me if Iām wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And Iām 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 ābalancersā 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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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.
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, itās natural to try to find the most popular server that provides most content to scroll through because thatās how it it used to work.
It also doesnāt help that join-lemmy.org highlights active users per month as a metric even though in the end it shouldnāt matter at all.
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. :)
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 š
There are two points:
Smaller instances are more likely to be abandoned/shut down, which currently means you lose your account.
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. :)
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.
Yeah, this is exactly my point. But I suppose a lot of people think that starting new instance is enough. But, unfortunately, it isnāt.
Itās still fairly new, hopefully thatās a feature that can be prioritized and added soon.