this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I'm quite worried of how well this federation system will work in the long run, especially when more people coming from Rexxit. As people make more post/comments, every federated instance will have to cache more redundant contents from each other, which also will use more storage thus increasing the fee of every instance hoster. There's also another problem of visibility in search engines. Because Lemmy/Kbin can be hosted by anyone, it makes searching on a specific domain impossible, unlike how I can just add "reddit" in the search query. Also since there are multiple Lemmy/Kbin instances, there's a chance there'll be similar communities spread over, fragmenting the communities even further. Until they can find a way to fix those problem, I don't think federation is suited for large scale communities.

As for fragmentation problem, maybe adding a global search for communities like this will help reducing fragmentation. Users can still make their own community in their instance, while other people who don't need to can easily find the community they want.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (7 children)

After a day of use, I'm incredibly disappointed.

The fragmentation problems, and lack of cohesive community discovery (or even apparently any agreed standards for sharing communities etc. across instances in a way the most popular app can reliably recognise as being a community and not an external link or mailto address) will make Lemmy an absolute non-starter for 99% of potential users.

I'm sure there are solutions, but as it stands I can't see Lemmy gaining any widespread adoption without a significant leap in user friendliness in regard to how federated instances are implemented and managed.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I don't think having a federated r/all would properly work in a federated network, where popular posts comes at the top of the community.

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