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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[โ€“] mrmanager@lemmy.today 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 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 pluses of having an account on a big overloaded instance? I cant see any pluses.

[โ€“] Averrin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

There are two points:

  1. Instance owners aren't ready to be a community manager and moderator. Also, a big instance costs much more. Many people just want to pay their 5$ in month and passively make their contribution.
  2. Not all users are "power users". They want to consume content. To make federation successful, we should provide a smooth UX. Balancers, meta-account, something like this. Smart enough to require only one click and utilize all available resources.
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