this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] 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 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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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A network of (“thousands of”) servers has — like most things — pros and cons.

Some of the pros are:

  • The network is more resiliant against outages. If lemmy.ml is down, all other users can still access the network.
  • It's hard to take legal action against the network or to buy it out (like Big Players™ like to do to get rid of potential competitors).
  • It allows various similar or even conflicting moderation policies. The network, i.e. the infrastructure doesn't allow or prohibit any specific opinion (the communities do).
  • It allows for different ways to pay the bills: goodwill of the admin, donaitions, ads, fee or selfhosting. The latter also allows great control over the data so you control your privacy.

Some of the cons are:

  • Content is replicated across servers, which increases the total amount of data stored.
  • Latency and speed suffer.
  • Interoperability with the wider Fediverse is less than 100%, which can create confusion and frustration.
  • Discovery is more difficult.