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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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[-] casey@lemmy.wiuf.net 2 points 2 years ago

A very valid question I am also interested in knowing. I’m wondering how much management it will be for me - who created his own instance and am having to find all the other communities myself. Or if my instance is doing anything but providing me a unique instance address and name.

[-] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 2 points 2 years ago

Based on the bit of research I have done, along with creating https://lemmyonline.com/

It seems you are correct. A small handful of servers contains roughly 95% of the user-base.

I think the intended way for this to work, certain communities can be hosted on their own servers. However, it appears most of the popular communities migrating away from reddit, all flocked to lemmy.world, which is likely contributing to it being overloaded.

[-] preasket@lemy.lol 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've suggested a routing protocol to the lemmy devs - to use federated instances to route all the messages to other federated instances. The idea was received with some interest, but it seems that people believe that there's still a ton of performance that can be squeezed out from the current architecture through optimisations.

[-] john12@lemmy.sbs 1 points 2 years ago

I just spun up my own instance as well and it does feel a bit like I'm just pulling from the biggest instances and feeding my own without really being able to give much back.

[-] passport@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago

You're reducing load on the bigger instances by not using them directly, which is giving something back

[-] qwacko@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 years ago

Does anyone have any idea what specs are required to run alemmy server, how about the "big" ones at the moment, just to get an idea of the scale of the challenge?

[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Here is a post from the admin of sh.itjust.works talking about his setup that is currently handling 2k+ users pretty well, and according to the latest update 10 minutes ago still has a lot more spare capacity to go.

I've seen some posts about self-hosted Lemmy servers that run very well on the cheapest VPS tiers that hosting services can provide (the 2-5 USD/month range).

[-] ComplexLotus@lemmy.world 0 points 2 years ago

Since Lemmy instance are not backed by commercial interest, but rather by nice volunteers and donors that have money and time to spare, they will be heavily affected by economic downturns (we still can see commercial interests still affect users negatively tho with reddit). Here are my thoughts on the matter:

  • as far as I understand the owner of the domain: https://lemmy.world even has to pay for this fancy domain name in the DNS system ... every month subscription service style
    • (and tbh I hate the Domain name system) why should I fund it with my own money?
    • if you hosted with an onion site over tor that expenditure would not exist, but how would users discover your site then? Let me know if you know something about this
  • in times of deflation (meaning money becomes worth more, spending some money on a self hosted lemmy instance becomes nonsensical)
  • tbh if I hosted a lemmy instance and the users of my instance posted high quality content in quantity I would use it to train my own LLM, that would at least create some economic incentive for me to host such a page ... but managing spam and bots will be HARD

That is why you should always back up your comments on your personal device, would be nice if lemmy had an automated way of doing this (I should look into this more)

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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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