this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Programming
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As far as I know, every server connects to every other server. Allowing for proxying messages through servers would significantly help.
I agree.
Random ideas:
The Kademlia protocol (a DHT) has a thing that associates ownership of data to the 20 closest nodes in a P2P network. If an approach like this were used, the load would be spread across those 20 nodes. I implemented that like 15 years ago or so. It was a ton of fun.
Another, simpler approach is what you suggested, simple caching of and relaying through other nodes, though that does not answer the topology of the network. How would an instance decide where to get it's data from (a star, a tree, at random, ...)? How would it be authenticated (easy to solve)? Lots of fun problems to solve. Not fun problems though if you have a pile of other problems too though...
I thought of it like this:
If an instance misbehaves by not relaying messages despite claiming to be doing so - unfriend it.
Each instance publishes a public key that you can use to verify relayed messages.
I probably should get on to helping out developing Lemmy - it feels like there's RFC's to be written and interesting problems to be solved. Much more interesting than what I'm doing at work.