this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
128 points (90.5% liked)

Selfhosted

39194 readers
434 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] cfx_4188@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 year ago

Lemmy is very similar to Matrix. By the way, there are channels in Matrix. There are communities on Telegram....

[–] reinar@distress.digital 7 points 1 year ago

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

almost. It's actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that's it, you'll get only new stuff after that, so there's no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn't fetch posts and comments manually.

ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.

I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though... Let's say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it's possible.

[–] halictuz@lemmy.one 6 points 1 year ago (10 children)

Matrix suffers extremely of this issue. It feels like 95% or more are on matrix.org instance. And all major chat rooms are hosted there too.

I think something like a weekly cap for new registrations as an option would be good. With a hint to other instances.

It's kinda the same issue that some games have, like MMOs. People tend to make new accounts on the biggest and overloaded servers because there is the most activity even though stability could be an issue, or login queues.

But that doesn't make sense on matrix or Lemmy. Because you can still access all content no matter where you are.

[–] themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Amen on matrix. Federating with most popular rooms on matrix.org basically brings my server to it's knees for a week trying to play catch up between federating users and their profile pictures and decrypting years of chat history. On my first go I made the mistake of trying to join #matrix:matrix.org and I had to wipe the entire server clean to get it back.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

> Because you can still access all content no matter where you are.

If you know how and want to do it. Unfortunately, it isn't the way how most people think.

[–] apolinariomabussy@lemmy.calvss.com 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

And fortunately, there's still time for people's minds to change. Federation and decentralization are things that aren't really advertised or mainstream yet so people still don't have a clue what it is. However, we do know how those things work, so I guess it's kind of up to us to help people know about how said things work.

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›