And I guess this question is two parts: 1. Regarding the current lemmy implementation, and 2. The activityPub protocol in general

  • @[email protected]English
    7•2 years ago

    I had a similar curiousity… Like if I make my own instance but it’s just myself, is that even a net positive to the network? Now there’s a new instance pulling everything I want to it, rather than another bigger instance that might have used that share subscriptions…

    • CyclohexaneOPEnglish
      3•2 years ago

      if it is a hindrance on the entire network, it would be interesting to explore the idea of “instance pools” in the future. Many smaller instances act as a single instance when it comes to network federation, but still maintain data separation, moderation and management. I would assume these instances would just have to have the same federation list.

      • @PriorProjectEnglish
        1•2 years ago

        I’m not aware of real-world fediverse examples, but a common approach to this kind of thing in distributed systems in general would be to introduce a federation hub/proxy that relays messages from the main instance, and who’s only job is to handle the fan-out load required to copy one stream of federation messages from the server to become many streams to all the federated subscribers. There are also approaches to have a pool multiple such proxies.

        Again, no idea how these suggestions apply to ActivityPub, but many systems do this kind of thing and I’d sort of expect it would work with ActivityPub (or could be made to work with some effort once the network is big enough to warrant it).

    • @PriorProjectEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      I haven’t kept the links handy, but the devs have said several times that federation load is not a problem right now, it’s browse traffic setting the db on fire in big instances.

      So a single-user instance is fine for now, but someday as the network grows…maybe there are enough instances that federation replication is a notable source of load.

      Right now, I wouldn’t worry about it… you’re on an instance that’s well run and has lots of capacity. That’s the best kind of place for you to be for now.