Hey all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, please point me in the right direction if not:

So I only came here because of the exodus from reddit, but I’m pumped to see this community and all this technology people have been making. It’s like a return to the old-school, user-operated internet instead of the big awful silos that have been dominating the landscape since the early 2000s. I’m in.

So quick question, are there plans or projects in the works for distributed hosting (making it easier for the users to take up the load of storing and hosting content so the instance operators aren’t stuck with the hosting costs)?

I ask because I’d like to work on a project to implement this, as I feel it’d be a massive further step forward. I’m not sure though if there’s anything existing I should be trying to get up to speed on or if I should be thinking in terms of starting my own project if I want to be working on it.

  • terribleplanEnglish
    11•2 years ago

    Instances are the way to distribute the load, they are basically acting as a read replica for every thing a user on that instance views. Yes, this may be “inefficient” in terms of storage an instance needs, but it is highly efficient in offloading the burden of a popular post to hundreds of instances instead of tens of thousands of users. Further, this makes the system resilient as every instance has a largely real-time copy of the things their users care about, even if the “origin” instance goes offline.

    • Saik0English
      9•2 years ago

      Further, this makes the system resilient as every instance has a largely real-time copy of the things their users care about, even if the “origin” instance goes offline.

      This is also a great point. Lemmy.ml is getting hit hard and having sporadic outages. My instance can continue to serve the items it’s received to my users just fine. Effectively no downtime…