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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 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You clearly don't know what I mean. While the each node is storing the same block chain... not every node is handling the same amount of traffic. Nodes can choose which nodes to peer with. I, for example, have a full node that only accepts traffic from a handful of trusted nodes and from my self-hosted btcpay instance.

Users can choose what nodes they wish to validate their wallets to. Many companies and exchanges only validate against their own full nodes. This is not equal. There is no sense of "equal" here. Aside from eventually the "correct" block chain is eventually agreed upon by the majority of the network.

This is exactly the same in this case... lemmy instances that want to peer, will peer. The activitypub standard will broadcast updates just like a block solve notification to the blockchain network. It's up to each node/peer what they do with it.

[–] Averrin@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Ok, you are right about peering, I tried to get more peers to be faster, but it isn't necessary. I didn't find anything about ActivityPub broadcasting, but if it's true... so, yeah, having rpc p2p connection doesn't make the whole system less federated. But still, usually crypto clients has lists of nodes (or api balancers) for faster handling.