Fediverse

I think this is going outside the realm of self-hosting and moreso into actually creating a server architecture. All servers would need to use the same database, so you'd want likely as its own server a database server, caches on the front-end servers so popular things aren't queried for the same info again and again.

I've never set up anything like this, so this is just me trying to think of how I'd throw it together, I'm sure there's a bunch of async problems I've not even considered how to tackle, and even having the DB be offsite from either of the front-end servers would be less than ideal.

I suppose you could have the DB in one of the servers, but then that one now has the same frontend-load as the other while it also is the only one doing DB queries, so the load's not really being distributed properly. 🫠

At that point it's easier to run your own instance, I guess? As it stands now, it's not trivial to scale neither the db storage (postgres) nor the backend (lemmy).

I don’t think that users’ donating parts of compute is a way to go, honestly. You’ll have to think about bad actors (such users will effectively be instance admins for some subset of data), and it might quickly deteriorate into the weird crypto world (aka let's use blockchain as a storage because no one can be trusted to really count the upvotes).

Unfortunately, it's a very tricky issue to solve. I'd say donating to your instance so that its operators have enough finances to support it is the way.

... creating our own capability to make cloud computing infrastructure basically...? Yea that'd be kinda cool. Would piss Amazon off though, we might have our hands full at the moment. Drawing the scrutiny of another tech giant this early might be ... unwise.