Can Lemmy have distributed communities (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by Mastersord@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I was thinking about this in regards to all the “defederation” posts.

Let’s say you spin up a server and over night it gets super popular and grows enormous. Now your yearly expenses shoot up and you’re forced to either look for a new host or shut down.

Now what if instead, you could get a few other people to spin up more small instances and distribute parts of your biggest communities to them, however the users don’t notice because The communities are looking across instances instead of within their home instance?

That’s the idea at least. This would allow for many things but most importantly, it would make things a bit more manageable. Thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

That's basically how it works already. When a user on server A is looking at a community on server B, they're not actually hitting server B. When the first person subscribes to the community, server A started downloading and caching all the content. The user is looking at it locally. Server A will then periodically synchronize with server B.

This means the primary load is on the server containing the users, not the server containing the community.

this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023

30 points (96.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43992 readers

692 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS