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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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[–] Saik0Shinigami@lemmy.saik0.com 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So you’re still exerting at least the same load as if you were browsing lemmy.ml directly.

Not quite accurate... although probably reasonably close.

The activitypub transaction is just a small amount of text. The formatting and display of the page and tracking of user sessions and other transactional data that you would need to handle for the user itself...

Ultimately server->server transactions are much simpler and easier than server->user transactions.

Edit: one user instances are not helping much... But the moment you get 2 or more eyeballs on the same content on a remote instance... it starts to matter. Start a local instance with 10-100 users? You're making a large dent in traffic on the origin (in relation to the content origin) server's usage.