this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
29 points (93.9% liked)
Lemmy.ca's Main Community
2758 readers
2 users here now
Welcome to lemmy.ca's c/main!
Since everyone on lemmy.ca gets subscribed here, this is the place to chat about the goings on at lemmy.ca, support-type items, suggestions, etc.
Announcements can be found at https://lemmy.ca/c/meta
For support related to this instance, use https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy_ca_support
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, the thing about the federated system, is that the server loads are distributed among the different instances that are run by individuals. This way, no one instance gets too big to afford to sustain itself.
But yeah, basically donations are what any instance will likely be run off of. I'm sure there will be people trying to profit off of it somehow, by charging people for accounts, maybe, at some point. Or running ads, etc. But as it is right now, I believe the idea is to have this system be free and sustained through donations.
*edit: The best way to get an answer to a question is to confidently post an incorrect answer and let someone correct you. :)
Server load is a funny thing, I suspect if your instance hosts many busy communities that your instance is going to have increased resource needs quickly. While search and feeds are shared each community is owned by a specific instance correct?
It's not quite that straightforward. There's some non linear network effects -- as more communities emerge, each instance is likely to be pulling content from more and more communities. Thus the storage costs along will baloon, and the instance to instance communication will baloon, but not necessarily scaling with user count. It's not likely to be scalable in the long term, if my math is correct.
It'd be like each subreddit having to make a copy of the entire reddit database, over the network, to participate in reddit. Works on a small scale. Fails badly if the community is too large.
Does it have to be that way? Excuse my lack of fediverse and general networking knowledge, but couldn't a user instead retrieve the data directly from the instance a post is hosted on without their instance needing to interact with it at all?
I see how there's limited scalability in the example you provide, but I feel like it shouldn't be necessary for each instance to make their own copy of things and rather have the user get the data directly from the host instance.
What does "federated" mean? I've seen the word everywhere but with no explanation.
It means there’s a bunch of different instances and they can share stuff with each other. Here’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far (it has some extraneous info tho) https://lemmy.world/post/149743
So to further my consern it looks like I am right and that load from other servers is already crushing some servers and forcing them to disconnect / de federate. https://lemmy.ca/post/681826
Scaling of the platform and the servers WILL be an issue. It sounds like the more external servers users here subscribe to, the more LOAD there will be on THIS instance, especially if those external subscriptions are high traffic.