I have a domain name that I own but am not making use of and was thinking of setting up my own personal Lemmy instance, partly so I can have a Lemmy id and instance that I can completely control, partly so that I can contribute directly to my hosting cost, and partly because it might be fun to tinker with (or it might just end up being a pain; I’m still trying to figure out which is the case).
However, from this comment it sounds like, rather than contributing to horizontal scaling and easing the load on other servers, I might actually end up increasing the load on other servers by adding yet another server that the other servers have to talk to in order to keep my server updated on the latest comments and posts to which I am subscribed.
So given this, would self-hosting a personal instance actually make things worse for everyone else and thus be an irresponsible action at this time and/or for the foreseeable future? Because the last thing that I want to do is to inadvertently add a burden to the fediverse!
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I’m thinking this would be the case if your instance had more than 1 user subscribed to that community in the large instance - but if it is just you, wouldn’t it be similar to accessing each instance and viewing the communities there?
No. Operations like removing blocked user comments, tracking your subscriptions themselves (showing only yours when you’re on teh subscription tab), and tracking your sessions are all database heavy operations. You would be trading database heavy operations with “origin needs to send activity pub messages” to you. Activitypub messages were already being generated and is simply just also sent to you… it’s very little network traffic and that’s it.
As long as your instance views most content it receives at least once… you’re well above par for doing your work to lighten the load on the origin server.
As I understand it, there are two kinds of costs that need to be considered: the cost of viewing content, and the cost of receiving content. The first is incurred every time you access your instance and is limited to your instance, whereas the latter is incurred every time something you’ve subscribed to has received an update, and is incurred not only by your instance but also by the server hosting the community. My concern is that, while hosting my own instance would reduce the load on other servers by absorbing the first kind of cost, it would also increase the load on other servers by increasing the second kind of cost.
The devs have stated that browsing load is where the main performance problems are right now. That said, it’s mainly a problem on the biggest instances like lemmy.ml. I don’t believe that sdf.org where your account is hosted is having any difficulty serving the browse load for it’s user. But if it did grow (or if I’m already wrong), then moving to a smaller instance would help them.
The devs had stated as recently as last-weekish that load from federated replication was not an issue. That said, this week I’ve seen reports from non-devs of lagging replication… so that could indicate that as the network has grown, and has the rate of writable interactions has grown, maybe replication load is becoming interesting. Another possibility is that people have poorly tuned settings and Lemmy has poorly tuned defaults. There’s a setting that controls the number of workers that perform federation replication and large instances at least must tune this to keep up with the rate of federation events they must send. it may be as simple as updating this default to fix the current wave of federation lag.
So… theoretically… the optimal balance is a medium number of medium sized instances. You’re already contributing to that balance by being on sdf.org (a medium sized instance), and I don’t think it’s worth moving your account for performance reasons. That said, if you really wanted to move your account for personal reasons, doing so would be fine. If 10k or 20k people moved to single user instances overnight, could there be problems caused by the increase in federated replication load? Quite probably yes. Lemmy will have to grow it’s capacity both in terms of handling browse load on bigger nodes… and also federation load on a bigger network. There are still unexplored approaches for scaling in both these directions and I’m not sure anyone knows which will be more serious yet except to observe that mastodon is already a much bigger ActivityPub network that’s doing alright in terms of federation load.
My advice is don’t sweat it and jistmuse your current account.
The former is done at the “convenience” of the publishing server, e.g. they get to it when they get to it. The latter is an on-demand response to your browser’s request.