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?
Seeing Lemmy groan under influx of new users, but still a much smaller number than established centralized apps made me start wondering how it would scale to a couple of orders magnitude larger numbers. I’ve only started diving into code and architecture, but I’m worried that as the number of instances grow they’ve got an N! connection problem going. This is not a simple problem to fix for a federated system, but it’s got to be addressed eventually.