Imagine the following:

  • Servers declare a target number of users/posts-per-day (enables programmatically detecting when other people’s servers are generally under/over capacity)
  • Severs have a recommender list of other servers (whitelist), separate and more exclusive than their non-blocked list

Whenever someone goes to the sign up page, for example, on Lemmy.world, we:

  • look at the recommender list
  • find the server that is most under capacity
  • have a very large iframe with “Sign up for Lemmy (using [under capacity server here])”
  • have a small “No, I want to sign up specifically on Lemmy.world” option

AND, as a precaution against maybe-malicious takeovers (e.g. a Facebook server saying it has unlimited capacity and all new users getting forwarded to them) a server can set it’s own maximum recommender caps; e.g. “recommended” servers won’t be recommended if they’re above 10,000 users even if they claim they could handle more.

Thoughts?

  • SpziEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    I like the idea and how it’s presented. Yes, I think this might work.

    Then I asked myself why we need it and if we really lack tools to solve it.

    What I mean is: Instances can already close themselves for new registrations. Or they can make their signup process less easy (for example by requiring a written statement why the user wants to join specifically them).

    If instances don’t do that, would they opt into your system instead? After all, both depend on the instance to want to grow slower. In both cases, I’d expect those instances to become the biggest who simply accept any new signup for themselves.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      The idea would be to not add barriers to entry for new users or require servers to advertise/add barriers to entry themselves.

      I think we should ask the reverse questions;

      • Why should severs have to manually advertise themselves and manually erect barriers-to-entry (which are both crude/slow techniques for hitting a target number of users) when Lemmy.world could almost instantly send them all the new users they desire, stop exactly when they’re full, and do it in a completely automated way?
      • Why should new inexperienced users have to deal with barriers to entry and then have to search around for some obscure Lemmy instance on their own, when we could automatically guide them to an obcure server looking for new members?

      New servers can still use their old/existing methods, but if they want they could “opt-in” by asking to be on the recommded-server list of Lemmy.world (or whoever)

      Getting on the front page of Google is hard and Lemmy.world has done it. Instead of that achievement working against us (and having to manually tell/confuse people saying “please don’t just sign up for lemmy.world”) why not leverage that achievement to create a maximally-distrubted system. Cause we can eat our good-user-experience cake (Google “Lemmy”, click on the first link, put in sign up information) and still have our dont-put-everyone-on-one-server cake too.