this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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Are all these thousands of servers useless? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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 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. Is there any "balancers" to utilise these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with a such fast growth?

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[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The problem is that in order to understand how the system works you have to use it first. Now if you are one of the people running away from Reddit, it's natural to try to find the most popular server that provides most content to scroll through because that's how it it used to work.

It also doesn't help that join-lemmy.org highlights active users per month as a metric even though in the end it shouldn't matter at all.

[–] arcrust@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Yup. I signed up for Lemmy.ml before I realized that. I think it'd be really helpful if the instances set a cap on number of users, so theat when you went to join-Lemmy.org and saw that beehaw has 1.9k users OUT OF 2k, then it'd be more likely to sign up for a different instance.

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah I was surprised to see that myself. I guess one thing that is easier for new users is that local communities will just show up on their instance under Communities, and they dont have to add them from other instances. I can see the advantage of that I guess.

But it would be a shame if all these new users end up on the top 5 instances and just make them full and overloaded, and then the users will complain about bad performance and technical issues with Lemmy. Its a completely self-inflicted problem, and the exact problem the technology was designed to solve. :)

[–] WalterzarBoBalterzar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. Having grown up with MMOs in the early 2000s I honestly thought I needed to pick the biggest most active instance akin to chosing an active game server 😅