Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

3 years ago by Averrin to c/selfhosted

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?

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solidarity 37 points 3 years ago

I've created my own instance in order to not create more load on others and it took a minute to realise I needed to populate it myself, would be nice to have a default view aggregating popular posts etc. across instances. But maybe I'm just asking for too much hehe

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claymedia 15 points 3 years ago

That's an interesting idea. Maybe you could even choose the "default subs" for your instance from across lemmy.

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solidarity 9 points 3 years ago

That would be awesome I think! I am toying with the idea of building a proper instance, put my devops skills to use, but at the same time, few features missing!

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Debo 8 points 3 years ago

Seems to me that this is the ONLY way that a user (let's call them creators for the sake of this convo) can guarantee that their efforts are always both protected AND remain available as the creator sees fit.

If I start my own lemmy server and I'm the ONLY user, it would stand to reason that if I deprecated that server that all of my posts EVERYWHERE would instantly cease to exist (with exception of quoted posts in other's comments). That gives me 100% of control over MY specific content contribution to this platform. So, if in the future lemmy goes the way of reddit, it's as simple as us staging a walk-out just like we did to reddit, except NOTHING would show up on reddit anymore.

Am I missing something here? For true creators, spinning up a cheap server to host is acceptable if not expected if you want any type of control after the "Post" button is pressed.

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Puffymumpkins 5 points 3 years ago

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theterrasque 2 points 3 years ago

If I have understood how lemmy works, the post and comment would be on the instance hosting the community. Your server would just post it to the community's server on your behalf.

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juandemarco 1 point 3 years ago

This seems like a great solution, does it work this way? I admit I've not delved too much into how federation works, but I assumed that when content gets pulled from one instance to another it gets replicated to that other instance, so deletion becomes problematic.

In any case, being in complete control of one own's online presence seems like a great way forward.

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SmugBedBug 4 points 3 years ago

I did the exact same thing. Ended up looking up the more popular communities on the bigger instances and searched for them on mine to index them.

I wish there was an easier way, but for now there isn't.

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