Basically, I have read several statements addressing this topic. For example:
“If my server gets too big I will just close registrations”
“Server X got too big, so they closed registrations to manage the load”
While I do understand that this can help for small servers which don’t have a big number of external users. How does this help with big and popular servers? Don’t they have to serve requests from external users using their resources? For example, I might self host a server just for my account but I read all my content from lemmy.world. Am I not using their bandwidth and their resources anyway?
Bonus question: Does federating with other servers increase the resource usage of my server? What kind of metadata/data do I have to store from each server I federate with?
Thanks!
Up until early July, Lemmy was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Federation had massive performance overhead due to some bugs and each additional instance that went online and subscribed to the big 4 popular servers was causing an even worse load problem than if say 30 users had joined directly. Especially instances that wanted a fully populated All listing, that meant every single thing was being sent to the server even if nobody was really reading that stuff.
And things like searching for topic content are going to be pretty limited given these newer servers don’t have much history.
The aftermath of this attempt to scale is that there is also likely a lot of duplicate data, conversations that are mostly repetitive and posts to the same topics. Let alone the bugs Lemmy has federating deletes and moderation removal that doesn’t impact direct users on the main servers as much.
Interesting, I thought every social network that implemented the ActivityPub spec behaved in exactly the same way. Thanks!
Lemmy is written in Rust, I don’t think any other ActivePub platform uses Rust.
Lemmy is written in Rust, I don’t think any other platform uses Rust.