this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Scalability. Most federated Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects started by every day joes and privacy advocating sysadmins. These instances can handle a modest amount of activity. Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded. At the scale of tens of thousands of active users you NEED proper infrastructure and a dedicated team. These are not things that come easy when the instance generates no revenue besides meager donations. Lemmy.world is looking for on call system operators willing to contribute 5-10 hours per week. Good help is rarely cheap let alone free.
Everyone is a lot safer, faster and less vulnerable by being on smaller servers.
It's not possible to ddos thousands of smaller instances in the same way. And if communities were spread out, taking a few instances down wouldn't even be noticeable.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe not so much as a ton of these smaller instances are consolidated on a just a handful of hosting providers.
When Lemmy.world was ddos'ed, other instances didn't feel any of the effects, despite being on the same hosting provider. So it really matters - spread out :)
I expect as federation becomes more common we'll see patterns like user servers, community servers, archive/redundancy servers, and eventually it'll be less clustered. My instance that this version of me is on is much snappier than lemmy.world but it's also federated differently and that's very obvious when searching or browsing all
Yeah I'm not exactly clear over why federation differs either. Its designed not to differ I assume?
It is actually! The idea is you can join servers with certain levels of curation. For example if lemmy.world decided tomorrow it didn't like blahaj.zone it could defederate them. That's not the point of blahaj.zone but think of it like having multiple reddit accounts with different subscriptions each account is like a superpowered multireddit on it. You choose the subreddits that go in the multireddit but not that the account it's on subscribes to
The person hosting lemmy.myserv.one is trying to acquire more users because they want to take some of the load off of lemmy.world.
If you want something less burdened than lemmy.world, you should make an account over here. Do your Lemmy browsing from here, you know?
I heard 0.18.4 has performance improvements.
What you're describing is a problem with doing centralization in the fediverse. If you instead federate in the fediverse, it scales fine.