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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Averrin@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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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 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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[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As I said, there is no profit from empty instances. Of course, the federation itself is good and fail-proof in this way. But if nobody asks for this cache, it's just an Internet Archive of a sort.

[–] zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org 9 points 1 year ago

It only takes one user for an instance to not be empty. Every bit of decentralisation adds resilience to the whole. But more decentralisation adds more resilience, so let's try to spread out the communities and users.

[–] library_patron@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I see—you're talking about instances with no users? Yes, those don't help much. Maybe edit the typo "a significant piece of auditory" in the original post, since I guessed that you were talking about instances with users but no communities.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's nothing about communities. Technically speaking, only the amount of direct HTTP requests matters. If nobody opens your domain, your instance is just spending your money for nothing.

[–] zergling_man@lemmy.perthchat.org 5 points 1 year ago

Instance A blocks instance B, which also blocks back. I create a single-userr instance and subscribe to communities on both.