Selfhosted

573 readers

1 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.

Resources:

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

> Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world

135

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

154 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] KelsonV@lemmy.world 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I just commented on this in another thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/76011

TL;DR: The server-to-client interactions on Lemmy are a lot heavier than the server-to-server interactions, so even if you're just using your own server to interact with communities on other servers, it should still take load off of the servers you would have been using directly.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh, so the problem is about just serving static assets? TBH, I think this problem should be mostly solved, especially for such minimalistic UI. Maybe some (free) CDN? Also UI can use any lemmy server for most of requests (e.g. fetched federated_servers fom a bootstrap node) and use "logged one" only for user actions. I think it isn't a terrible difficult task for the current ui (it has it's own backend).

[–] KelsonV@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not the static assets, it's the database queries

[–] Azzu@feddit.de 9 points 1 year ago

To expand, every user has their custom set of content that they want to see, which needs to be queried from the database. Mainly their subscriptions, those will rarely be the same between any two users, and they need to be aggregated according to the sorting method the user wants. Or other personal things, like every user's messages/replies/notifications/settings.

[–] LookThere@fedia.io 3 points 1 year ago

That's news to me. I thought serverto-server interactions would be heavier since other instances will keep fetching contents from your instance once they start federating. I guess it's better to join less populated instances instead of crowding on a single instance.