Sounds like you would prefer a peer2peer approach instead of federation? A few years ago, I wrote up why I don’t belief in p2p. In short: It’s too costly and too complex.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I think a amall hit of p2p can be useful. Maybe as an addition layer. I worked a lot with tendermint nodes (cryptocurrency) and i saw pretty effective solutions.
I worked a lot with tendermint nodes (cryptocurrency)
If you worked with crypto, I think you would understand that ALL crypto is federated, not P2P. You need full nodes to communicate with in order to validate transactions. This is fundamentally federation, anyone can spin up their own full node and participate however they want.
Same is happening here with ActivityPub instead of block chain transactions.
Based on the bit of research I have done, along with creating https://lemmyonline.com/
It seems you are correct. A small handful of servers contains roughly 95% of the user-base.
I think the intended way for this to work, certain communities can be hosted on their own servers. However, it appears most of the popular communities migrating away from reddit, all flocked to lemmy.world, which is likely contributing to it being overloaded.
I just spun up my own instance as well and it does feel a bit like I'm just pulling from the biggest instances and feeding my own without really being able to give much back.
You're reducing load on the bigger instances by not using them directly, which is giving something back
every instance is sharing in the traffic to browse the fediverse. Not one service is responsible for serving content, you (the instance admin) are only serving for your members.
The downside of this is there is a huge amount of replicated data stored everywhere. Content of popular communities will be scraped by and stored on many many servers, filling up servers and increasing storage and bandwith bills for all those servers
Please elaborate, how is "every instance is sharing in the traffic to browse the fediverse". I didn't find it nor in AP standards, nor in activitypub_federation lib docs. If there is some mechanisms of balancing inside the lemmy's code, would you mind pointing it for me?
I've suggested a routing protocol to the lemmy devs - to use federated instances to route all the messages to other federated instances. The idea was received with some interest, but it seems that people believe that there's still a ton of performance that can be squeezed out from the current architecture through optimisations.
Since Lemmy instance are not backed by commercial interest, but rather by nice volunteers and donors that have money and time to spare, they will be heavily affected by economic downturns (we still can see commercial interests still affect users negatively tho with reddit). Here are my thoughts on the matter:
- as far as I understand the owner of the domain: https://lemmy.world even has to pay for this fancy domain name in the DNS system ... every month subscription service style
- (and tbh I hate the Domain name system) why should I fund it with my own money?
- if you hosted with an onion site over tor that expenditure would not exist, but how would users discover your site then? Let me know if you know something about this
- in times of deflation (meaning money becomes worth more, spending some money on a self hosted lemmy instance becomes nonsensical)
- tbh if I hosted a lemmy instance and the users of my instance posted high quality content in quantity I would use it to train my own LLM, that would at least create some economic incentive for me to host such a page ... but managing spam and bots will be HARD
That is why you should always back up your comments on your personal device, would be nice if lemmy had an automated way of doing this (I should look into this more)
The thing you’re overlooking is that for a lot of the people hosting small instances, this is a hobby.
Speaking for myself, the cost of a domain is basically nothing, and adding Lemmy to my hosting setup was zero - I already have more ram, cpu, and disk space than I’d ever need for this instance.
Financial incentives are not the only thing people care about, and until relatively recently weren’t the general default purpose of online social spaces.
Ok, sure. But what if your instance became popular and started costing you hundreds per month? Or in a couple years and you lose interest, do you keep paying for it? What happens to all of the content that users created on your instance?
Well, I'm very explicitly not running it with the intent of it getting larger than maybe a couple dozen people I know who are interested. I'm not really interested in content moderation at any scale, let alone with random people I don't know from the internet. (My most recent job was dealing with content & abuse for a large cloud provider, and I have zero interest in picking up shitpost babysitting if it's avoidable.)
I'm otherwise going with the Mastodon Server Covenant as the basic guidelines: I've got a trusted friend I'm going to add as a 2nd admin, doing backups nightly, and at least a 90 day notice if/when I decide to stop hosting this.
I'd happily transfer the domain & data to anyone who wants to continue to admin it, or ask the community members what they want done.
I'll admit that makes WAY less sense if I wanted to run an instance with thousands of users, but that's very much not the goal.
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you mean do something like blockchain ?