Lemmy

Except we’re not CDNs. Instances aren’t run by companies, most of the time, but by volunteers. Not that I have anything against companies running instances, but it’s not what the fediverse is about.

So the question of resources is a sensible one, whether or not the current protocol and architecture has worked in the past.

And the threadiverse’s difference in format is precisely the difference in highlighting. Sync for microblogs is over the posts of individual users that are followed. Sync for the threadiverse is over a community which comprises many users’ posts. Communities with threads versus single user microblogs … this is the format difference. And it’s the difference in what gets synced. Right, please correct me if I’m wrong.

And so, if I’m right, the question of how much gets duplicated also differs.

Whether the threadiverse has more duplication depends on the details, of course. My reasoning was that it would be easier for more duplication to occur on the threadiverse, as whole collections of conversations of many users will duplicated simply from one users single subscription. This is compared to the microblog platforms where users often only follow hundreds of people (my impression only).

Of course, it may be that any users output is distributed over many communities, so that communities turn out not to be larger overall (maybe this was your point). And also, as you say, cacheing and duplicating is how the internet works, so we should have ways to handle it.

All in all though, it would be nice to have some basic numerical analysis done, especially if we want people to start instances without worrying about getting burnt by ballooning costs.