Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it's from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe it would have to do so with local data.

To illustrate with some possibly-new-to-you examples:
!cyberpunk@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
!badrealestate@feddit.uk
!sideoftheroad@possumpat.io
!todayilearned@chat.maiion.com
!rpgmemes@ttrpg.network
!grenoble@jlai.lu
!relationshipmemes@lemmyis.fun

What's your experience like clicking these? Does it go through first time?
I realize they'll be people for whom these work first time no problem, and they'll wonder what I'm complaining about. I'm not really complaining about anything really, I'm just wondering if my instinctive reaction has any validity.

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[–] freamon@endlesstalk.org 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Especially since, and correct me if I am wrong, but every instance holds all of the data for all of the other instances too? (that they are federated with).

Just the text I think. It's not nothing, but if you upload an image to your instance as part of a post, the text is copied to my instance, but with just a link to the image, so it could be worse.

[–] o_oli@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Ahhh, ok that makes far more sense actually then. Text alone isn't too bad especially if there are some optimisations available along the way.

[–] kugel7c@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To put this into perspective. Wikipedia text only is under 100gb uncompressed.

[–] UFO64@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia isn't a social platform. I suspect that their text growth was log(n) or something of the like. The only new text are things that are literally new or updates.

Lemmy has no cap there. The amount of new text will grow in some proportion to the user base. The more users and more instances, the more text. To say nothing of duplication from cross posting when you get wonky cuts in the federation connections.

None of this is free and it's going to be a problem if Lemmy grows.