this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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#lemmy/#kbin has a problem that #mastodon hasn't even attempted to solve; groups and what happens when they get popular.

#Communities, #groups, #magazines, whatever they are called are implemented as #Actors in #ActivityPub. They are basically just *very* popular users who boost a *lot*.

You can't just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @[email protected] or @[email protected] is going to get HOSED on the regular.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So there is no way to horizontally scale?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The network can actually scale quite well thanks to the fact that other instances will act as mirrors of communities!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

But what happens when the instance hosting the community goes down? Are all external instances still able to participate in that community? I get that they are mirrored but will everyone still be connected?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If it's just a temporary outage, whatever the mirror has received prior to the outage will be shown to users on that other instance but only local interactions for that instance will update it, when it comes back up, things like votes and comments will be synchronized again across all of the instances.

For permanent outages, the community will just need to be started again on a new instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reading this and trying to visualize the big picture, I think this is where kbin's magazine is going to win out in the end

[–] Whooping_Seal 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Out of curiosity, how is kbin's magazine system designed to avoid this problem?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But they could pick up where the now defunct community left off, right? Like, the cached copy from another server could be imported on a new server elsewhere?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That functionality doesn't currently exist, but migration of communities is something that's being actively talked about for development.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No. The "single source of truth" is the instance hosting the community. If it goes down the community itself goes down with the ship. The only way to prevent it is to have a IT infrastructure that can provide redundancy

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

having a redundant system is feasible (I'm just a dev, not an architect so don't take my words for granted) but it have to be designed and putted together ... and prices are gonna skyrocket

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Lemmy / the fediverse isn't designed this way, but it could be. There are certainly systems that share diskspace and are multimaster and keep stuff as long as someone is interested in it(i.e. accessing the data). I really start to think added to the lemmy / fediverse servers should be something like what freenet used to do in terms of hosting content.