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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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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[–] reinar@distress.digital 11 points 3 years ago

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

almost. It's actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that's it, you'll get only new stuff after that, so there's no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn't fetch posts and comments manually.

ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.

I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though... Let's say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it's possible.