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  • theyawnerEnglish
    7•1 year ago

    TL;DR: Accessing lemmy.world from a faster instance feels faster because you’re probably not really accessing lemmy.world.

    There’s likely two contributing factors as to why lemmy.world has been acting up lately:

    • It has the highest number of users to my knowledge.
    • It recently upgraded to 0.18.1-rc which in turn has resulted to some performance issues.

    From my experience, it seems like there’s an issue with how the lemmy.world’s frontend interacts with the backend. But it doesn’t seem to affect users from other instance because as I’ve said, they’re not really accessing lemmy.world.

    To elaborate, there was a post weeks ago on how beehaw defederating with lemmy.world affects the lemmy.world users. Of particular interest is an explanation on how ActivityPub works.

    The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you’re subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?

    It’s hosted on both! It’s hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It’s also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That’s why if you host your own instance, you’ll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.

    And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you’re reading the post that’s host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!

    So if I’m understanding it right, if you’re reading and commenting on this particular post, you’re really interacting with a copy of it in your instance. Your instance and lemmy.world will then synchronize the data through the ActivityPub protocol to ensure users from both instances sees the same content. This is a backend-to-backend interaction and thus may not be completely affected with lemmy.world’s issues.