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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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] 40 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

Every server just has a cache … there is no profit for the whole network …

I wouldn't say that caching is no profit. Yesterday there were several times when lemmy.ml was struggling or effectively down for some people, but despite complaints over there I could read lemmy.ml communities just fine through my instance. Caching meant that I was isolated from the service interruption, and the lemmy.ml server was isolated from my contribution to its load.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Well, lemmy.ml still needs to serve you the content the first time in order to cache it. And since you're the only person in your instance, you're the only person benefiting from that cache. So you're still exerting at least the same load as if you were browsing lemmy.ml directly.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

But only once, even if you open the content several times. And without transferring all the Web UI with it. And on the sending servers' own terms related to when to send or if at all. On the other hand the server has to send any changes in a subscribed topic, regardless of you being interested in it.

Overall I still would still think it is a benefit to run your own instance.

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