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Lemmy Federation Architecture Change Proposal (github.com)

submitted 1 year ago by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/technology@beehaw.org

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https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let's work on a solution to this problem together.

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[–] Fauxreigner@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you ensure that all messages are queued until processed, with retries on failure, what's the point of the hub model? As pointed out elsewhere, the large instances would be acting as hubs already.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just removing that load from the main instance server, allowing it to just handle serving its local user-base.

In short- splitting the load into multiple components, rather than everything being handled by just the single instance server.

[–] Fauxreigner@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm just not seeing a benefit here, I think this is a solution to the wrong problem. Your proposal in theory cuts outbound updates from the big hubs, but in reality they're only updating a subset of other instances for any given update, and it doesn't do anything to help with inbound updates. And to do that, you have to solve a pretty tricky problem.

If my instance gets an update from Beehaw, I can validate that they're allowed to do so, because Beehaw has a TLS certificate that says "Yep, this is actually Beehaw." If you introduce a hub system, I need some way to determine that the hub system that's telling me "Beehaw has an update for you" is allowed to send updates on behalf of Beehaw.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 2 points 1 year ago

To clarify-

After feedback/comments, I have modified the idea- this would be a optional local proxy/hub/delegation server/service, hosted by the instance owners.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245#issuecomment-1601585922

Ie- you can optionally scale your federation updates, independent of your main application server.