You are right. On the one hand, it's kind of bad, naive distributed architecture (my day job), it could have been done much better. On the other hand, the more important point is that it demonstrates an alternative to centralized. We'll learn a lot about usage patterns here, get new ideas, and either improve Lemmy or build something better from the ground up. Big thanks to Reddit for driving users this way to test scalability and get much better knowledge of usage.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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It's not distributed architecture as you normally think it - it's a decentralised federation. It's an important distinction from your typical distributed architecture app.
Can you explain what's the difference?
A distributed architecture generally refers to a single application or service designed to be resilient to individual data center failures. For example, Reddit, a centralized application controlled by Reddit itself, operates data centers around the world to process user transactions. In the event of an outage in a specific location, such as California, Reddit would still be able to function because its infrastructure for handling user requests and serving data would automatically switch to other functioning data centers elsewhere, like Nevada, Arizona, or Washington. This is an example of a distributed architecture.
On the other hand, a decentralized federation does not consist of a single application. Instead, it involves a software platform like Lemmy, which is hosted on multiple individual hosts. When a user signs up with one host, they can interact with users from other hosts, but each host manages its own infrastructure. For instance, someone could host a Lemmy instance on an old laptop they found in their closet and name it ballsuckers.com, while another person could host a Lemmy instance in the cloud with a properly designed distributed architecture and name it bingbong.com. Each host is responsible for managing its own instance. Users from both instances can interact with each other, but if, for example, the hard drive of ballsuckers.com were to fail, the entire ballsuckers.com instance would go down. However, this would not affect bingbong.com because its infrastructure is separate and managed independently.
I hope this helps!
it could have been done much better.
Care to expand on this point?
Disclaimer: I've only looked a bit at the protocols and high levels descriptions of how it works, and this is just my understanding of it. But it seems to track.
let's take .. [email protected] for example. Right now lemmy.world is the Source of Truth on this, which means if you sign up for it on a different host, let's say myawersomeinstance.com, that first contacts lemmy.world, copies over posts, and then subscribes on new posts for that. Actually not 100% sure if lemmy.world contacts myawersomeinstance.com when there's a new post, or myawersomeinstance.com polls lemmy.world.. But anyway, point is, lemmy.world is authority on it. myawersomeinstance.com also have [email protected] data, but it's a copy of it. And lemmy.world is only authority. So if you post something, your server then sends it to lemmy.world and waits a reply. Then lemmy.world contacts all instances that has at least one user following this to tell about the new post. And that new post now exists on a few hundred databases.
The problem is the scaling is whack. Okay, you can have 5000 federated servers with users subscribing to [email protected], but that means lemmy.world needs to update 5000 servers per post, and there'll be 5000x storage used for that post, and ALL 5000 servers contacts lemmy.world to get the new good stuff.
Frankly, it's a scaling nightmare. As for a different approach, you could have private / public keys and sign updates from lemmy.world and allow the other instances to fetch the new data from each other. That would also allow more relaxed caching, since it would be generally lower cost to re-fetch the data. Now you need aggressive caching because you don't want lemmy.world to keel over and die form every server on the planet wanting to hear the latest and greatest posts all the time.
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What makes a distributed system good that Lemmy hasn't done? Seems like a pretty robust system to me, seems like scaling issues are on the instance host themself. With Reddit's experience, I don't see how there are issues
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What's the alternative? You go full-banana decentralised or mega-site Reddit. I think Lemmy is a nice middle ground
Proper data model would be a start, i.e. public-key based identities instead of just the old name@server. That way you could hop from server to server and still be the same account. Would make the whole thing a hell of a lot more robust, as in case of server failure could just continue as if nothing happened on another server.
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I don't think that there are thousands. The fediverse stat's show about 300 servers, 200 or so made in the last week.
At that rate, it is not too bad. I expect there will be a plateau at some point, relatively soon, where the need for new ones stop, and the experimental ones disappear.
It's a bit worse than that actually. I'm now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn't have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That's going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, "Aww" gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I'll have to subscribe to both...
This is a feature, not a bug. But we definitely need a solution to make subscribing/coalescing them easier for users. Mastodon allows subscribing to topics (hashtags) - I think something similar is needed here, but that will evolve naturally over time.
Yes. This is 100% necessary. Otherwise giant communities would be built and probably all on lemmy.ml
Maybe have them coalesce based on channel name, but have local mods on each server. It'd be great if you could share moderation between trusted servers or trusted mods on different servers as well (this could be on a per-community or per-server basis).
you don't have to have an account on the same lemmy server to mod a community on it. The creator of the community can add anybody as a mod.
I don't get argument about duplicates. The same situation was on reddit - you've got few, sometimes more, subs about same topic. You could subscribe to whichever you wanted. Why on Lemmy this is suddenly a problem?
I think users are still having trouble with the mental model for browsing Lemmy.
The first interaction with the service is already fragmented - you need to choose where to create an account and start browsing. Even though you can browse communities from other servers, people are now seeing them through the lens of "fragmented" "my server vs other server" and that creates the illusion that these duplicates are somehow a huge issue.
But duplicates can actually be quite useful - a community called "memes" on Lemmy.world could attend to a different audience than a community also called "Memes" but made in an instance entirely in French.
Also, if two instances have two communities you enjoy, with the same name... Subscribe to both? Nothing stops you from doing that. It's okay. Reddit had "me_irl" and "meirl" which were the exact same, but with different mods, a relatively similar number of subscribers and quite honestly the same content. I didn't know the actual difference between the two, and I still do not know - I just subscribed to both and kept getting depressing memes to cry before going to sleep. No issues.
That's a really good analogy. Still, there needs to be an easier way to search remote communities. Copy pasting community links in search bar is really clunky.
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Are there ways to manage lists of such? For example, on the former platform that doesn't deserve a call out, you can do "me_irl+meirl" and aggregate both into one feed. This makes reading the (albeit potentially cross posted) content in a unified feed much easier.
Another similar point I'm having a hard time getting over is that with a centralized platform, it is easy to go to "Subject A", and see everything on that subject. However, now I need to see "Subject [email protected]", "Subject [email protected]", "Subject [email protected]"... Yes, I could subscribe to them all, but this ultimately end up creating a noisy home feed with also "Subject [email protected]", "Subject [email protected]", "Subject [email protected]", "Subject [email protected]", ... etc. all baked into one feed, as opposed to just something focused on "Subject A".
Lastly, discoverability leaves a lot of room for desire. Today, I'm fairly new to Lemmy, I am actively seeking out communities that I might be interested in, across multiple popular instances, and hoping that federation is enabled between the two instances. Tomorrow, I'd find that I'm subscribed to too many (see the noisy main feed issue above), and I'd remove a bunch. Next week, am I likely to go to the Join Lemmy directory to find new instances, and add "duplicate" communities from newly popular instances? I think not.
I think the long term survival of the platform (to expand beyond just us tech nerds that hate the former platform) will depend a lot on streamlining this workflow to make content discovery much more consistent. Even a simple option where a pseudo "!Community@" (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the "!Community" regardless of instance that you've subscribed to, might go a long way.
Discovery really has been the biggest drawback for me. The r/system combined with wikis and sidebars made it very easy to find interesting things.
That's lacking in lemmy so far. Which, it isn't a bad thing, barriers to entry have benefits. But from a user perspective, trying to replace reddit, the difficulty in navigating and finding things is frustrating.
But I'm coming from reddit, and they aren't meant to be the same. The issues are part of what makes it next to impossible for what happened there to happen in a federated system. And I'm so fucking sick of corporate bullshit ruining good things . I figure that lemmy will catch up in feature parity soon enough, and there's bound to be apps that make it easier to use at some point.
I just wish I had the resources to run a server myself.
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The feature I'll miss the most from Reddit is multireddits. I wish there were a way to create multilemmys.
Even a simple option where a pseudo “!Community@” (with no instance) feed that aggregates all the “!Community” regardless of instance that you’ve subscribed to, might go a long way.
I think we should have both this and multilemmys. For example, I would group all !gaming@... communities in an pseudo-community, then put it in a multilemmy with other gaming communities (Linux gaming, PC gaming, etc).
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undefined> I just subscribed to both and kept getting depressing memes to cry before going to sleep. No issues.
Hahahaha I’m sorry but the way you snuck this in at the end just killed me. But you have a valid point. Every platform like Reddit/Lemmy has duplicates. That is kind of the point.
Well one instance shouldn't monopolize a community. If it takes a dump on one instance at least it exists elsewhere. If I want to start up my own cat community I don't see why that's an issue.
I agree, I don't particularly see this as an actual issue... Nothing stops you from subscribing to both.
Just like there could be a [email protected] and a [email protected]. Nobody is confused with emails when it comes to this... The difference is that it's slightly more work than reddit because r/aww is one particular thing and it's assumed we're talking about Reddit because of it's unique format. Here it's just c/aww on lemmy.ml, but that's a bit of the point of the [email protected] structure of naming.
I LOVE that there's [email protected] and [email protected]. Different communities ran by different groups will end up with different content. Then I can shop for the content I want myself.
Nobody can singularly own the name. I always found that to be a big problem on reddit. r/trees comes to mind, if there was an actual arborist community that want r/trees, well they were fucked. And that's kind of jacked. This way it doesn't matter. Just pick a different instance that doesn't already have c/trees and post there... or better, start your own instance to host it.
I don't know... in the future people could even start up instances of lemmy on domains like lemmy.jobs, lemmy.help or lemmy.hobby to aggregate major communities based on topics. lemmy.jobs for instance could be an instance that houses professional the arborist and the domain would make it clear the intent. Or even better... drop the lemmy all together and register jobs.social or similarly descriptive domain names.
I know we're all a hodge-podge of domains now because a lot of us are just spinning up instance on domains we already have... but the potential is there.
This problem existed on reddit too still. You have r/games r/game r/gamers r/gamenews r/gamernews etc. All trying to do the exact same thing.
I think this comment convinced me. Because you're right, on Reddit there were always offshoot communities that were essentially the same exact thing just of different sizes and run by different people. There'll probably always be the "most popular" one, and then several offshoots for the same topic but perhaps a better sense of community because it's hundreds or thousands of users vs millions or tens of millions of users.
Remembering the exact instance and community name combinations will take a little extra effort, but not significantly and subscribing negates that mostly.
The one that pissed me off a lot is the misspelling of r/politcs trying to mimic r/politics. And i messaged the mods asking why they existed and was just either oblivious or trolled with their answer of "to talk politics".
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r/trees comes to mind, if there was an actual arborist community that want r/trees, well they were fucked.
There was. They ended up with, I think, /r/marijuana_enthusiasts or something like that. It was quite funny to both sides, at least it was like 15 years ago.
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That's true, and the point I guess. You sub to all relevant communities and the overlap isn't an issue because it's different communities with different instances making content with others interacting through federation. The "subreddit" is diversified to the top communities in all of the highest subscribed instances. It's just the nature of the beast, but once you find all the top comms it probably doesn't seem so bad.
They are not useless, if the users would actually spread out among them. Each server has its limits.
I just commented on this in another thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/76011
TL;DR: The server-to-client interactions on Lemmy are a lot heavier than the server-to-server interactions, so even if you're just using your own server to interact with communities on other servers, it should still take load off of the servers you would have been using directly.
That's news to me. I thought serverto-server interactions would be heavier since other instances will keep fetching contents from your instance once they start federating. I guess it's better to join less populated instances instead of crowding on a single instance.
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A network of (“thousands of”) servers has — like most things — pros and cons.
Some of the pros are:
- The network is more resiliant against outages. If lemmy.ml is down, all other users can still access the network.
- It's hard to take legal action against the network or to buy it out (like Big Players™ like to do to get rid of potential competitors).
- It allows various similar or even conflicting moderation policies. The network, i.e. the infrastructure doesn't allow or prohibit any specific opinion (the communities do).
- It allows for different ways to pay the bills: goodwill of the admin, donaitions, ads, fee or selfhosting. The latter also allows great control over the data so you control your privacy.
Some of the cons are:
- Content is replicated across servers, which increases the total amount of data stored.
- Latency and speed suffer.
- Interoperability with the wider Fediverse is less than 100%, which can create confusion and frustration.
- Discovery is more difficult.
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Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?
almost. It's actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that's it, you'll get only new stuff after that, so there's no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn't fetch posts and comments manually.
ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.
I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though... Let's say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it's possible.
I'm quite worried of how well this federation system will work in the long run, especially when more people coming from Rexxit. As people make more post/comments, every federated instance will have to cache more redundant contents from each other, which also will use more storage thus increasing the fee of every instance hoster. There's also another problem of visibility in search engines. Because Lemmy/Kbin can be hosted by anyone, it makes searching on a specific domain impossible, unlike how I can just add "reddit" in the search query. Also since there are multiple Lemmy/Kbin instances, there's a chance there'll be similar communities spread over, fragmenting the communities even further. Until they can find a way to fix those problem, I don't think federation is suited for large scale communities.
As for fragmentation problem, maybe adding a global search for communities like this will help reducing fragmentation. Users can still make their own community in their instance, while other people who don't need to can easily find the community they want.
After a day of use, I'm incredibly disappointed.
The fragmentation problems, and lack of cohesive community discovery (or even apparently any agreed standards for sharing communities etc. across instances in a way the most popular app can reliably recognise as being a community and not an external link or mailto address) will make Lemmy an absolute non-starter for 99% of potential users.
I'm sure there are solutions, but as it stands I can't see Lemmy gaining any widespread adoption without a significant leap in user friendliness in regard to how federated instances are implemented and managed.
I don't see fragmentation as a problem at all. The number of total subscribers is published when doing a search and is the ultimate primary consolidator just like reddit. There were many redundant subs on reddit for any given subject, they just had no patronage. The process of establishing primacy takes time. Three days ago .world had less than 1k users and all of Lemmy had less active users than half those present on any one of several instances right now. The .world instance is 10 days old.
The priorities of decentralized service will not align with the antithesis model. I see a minor complexity barrier to entry as a positive filter for some of the worst quality users.
Agreed. If decentralized doesn't appeal to certain people then this isn't for them. I came from reddit. I'm not trying to make this into reddit.
I initially felt the same way after a day or so of use, however once I got the app and figured out the clunkyness and rough edges it's really grown on me.
You're definitely right about discoverability but you're probably comparing this to Reddit that's had like 15 years to mature and sort it all out. Lemmy is made by like 2 developers for free and it's pretty impressive already what they've achieved.
I think if you give it more time and lower your expectations a little you'll appreciate it more. And you don't have to leave Reddit or whatever either, you can just use both and see what happens too.
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I've created my own instance in order to not create more load on others and it took a minute to realise I needed to populate it myself, would be nice to have a default view aggregating popular posts etc. across instances. But maybe I'm just asking for too much hehe
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I have my own Lemmy instance running on my home server, but I'm here. "But Bizzle," you may be asking yourself, "why go through all the trouble of configuring your own instance just to wind up on Lemmy.World anyway?"
I'm glad you asked! And the answer is that federation only fetches parent comments. I'm glad Lemmy exists, and I'm going to keep using it, but we need federated sibling comments for this to actually be good, in my opinion.
EDIT: I actually couldn't have been more wrong.
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Every server just has a cache … there is no profit for the whole network …
I wouldn't say that caching is no profit. Yesterday there were several times when lemmy.ml was struggling or effectively down for some people, but despite complaints over there I could read lemmy.ml communities just fine through my instance. Caching meant that I was isolated from the service interruption, and the lemmy.ml server was isolated from my contribution to its load.
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This has definitely been a problem with communities being created on the bigger instances and not utilising smaller instances. Happy for someone to say I'm wrong etc, but I think there would be merit in capping instances to x number of users or communities, to force the user base to spread out.
Also, the way signups work, (ie you find a community you like then click sign up but that signs you up to that instance), further exacerbates the issue and the confusion around how federation works. The sign up links on each instance should lead either to a page with an instance finder, or to a random instance that matches the profile of, and is already federated with, the instance you were on. Otherwise the larger instances have a monopoly and are just going to lead to a bad user experience when they can't cope with the traffic.
It's a self defeating prophecy if users only want to sign up to the instances with the big communities, because then everyone is going to keep creating communities there and nobody is going to want to join a smaller instance.
I might be talking nonsense and am happy to be told why that is all wrong :)
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Lemmy is very similar to Matrix. By the way, there are channels in Matrix. There are communities on Telegram....
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