this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
47 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

37736 readers
444 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
alyaza@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org
gyrfalcon@beehaw.org
rs5th@beehaw.org
Los@beehaw.org
coldredlight@beehaw.org
SemioticStandard@beehaw.org
TheRtRevKaiser@kbin.social
remington@beehaw.org
47
Lemmy Federation Architecture Change Proposal (github.com)
submitted 1 year ago by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/technology@beehaw.org
59 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] andscape@feddit.it 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I understand the logic, and you're right to think about how improve Lemmy's scalability. But I'm not sure if this is the way to go.

If you build a dedicated federation proxy for an instance, you've really just slightly moved the problem. The federation proxy is going to have the same scalability issues, and if anything the total load goes up.

If you build multi-instance hubs, you suddenly introduce a lot of new issues.

  • Security: I think Lemmy checks the source of an update to verify that it comes from the legitimate host. You would have to introduce some kind of signatures to verify that the activity originated from the legitimate host.
  • Privacy: now your users have to trust the hub owners with their data, not just the instance.
  • Motive: who would be running the hubs, and why? They would have to be even bigger that the instances, and there would be much less incentive to do it.
[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would agree with all of your above points.

That said- https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245 The most recent idea has popped up a few times on both lemmy, and now github- and actually sounds like a potential solution as well.

Just- using signed messages between instances, which can be transmitting P2P, instead of direct only.

[–] andscape@feddit.it 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah what's being described there is basically a P2P model. I still think it wouldn't make a huge difference in the chattiness of the protocol. At best it would redistribute the load for outgoing federation messages, but not for incoming ones. An instance still has to receive each message individually, regardless of where they comes from.