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Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What would happen if instead of users swarming existing servers when a fediverse service was put in the spotlight, each user spun up their own micro-instance and tried to federate with existing servers?

There's always the odd person who decides to host a personal fediverse service in their homelab for themselves, but would the fediverse work if that was actually the primary mode of interaction? Or would it fail in a similar way to now where the servers which receive the most federation requests need to scale up?

Presumably the failure modes for federation are easier to scale than browser requests since it's an async process.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s a similar concept to email, so I would imagine there will always be big players who will have a reputation of trustworthiness/reliability.

The whole concept here seems to favor spinning up your own “cache” instance between you and the content you want (similar to how old email clients worked, downloading emails from the mail server and never live-fetching them), which is fabulous for distributing the load. Discovery takes a back seat when doing that, but it’s still pretty doable.

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

I think the main difference between fediverse and email WRT cache instances is that if you create a cache instance for email, you're only caching your personal emails. If you create a cache instance for a lemmy community, you're caching every event on the community.

My intuition says there's probably a breakpoint in community size where the cost of federating all events to the users who subscribe to them becomes greater than the cost of individually serving API requests to them on demand. Primarily because you'll be caching a far greater amount of content than you actually consume, unlike with email.

Edit: That said, scaling out async work queues is a heck of a lot easier than scaling out web servers and databases. That fact alone might skew the breakpoint far enough that only communities with millions of subscribers see a flip in the cost equation...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe I'm wrong (I'm on Lemmy since yesterday morning) but if you host your instance you're only caching the communities you are interested in ...if you never care about a community or interacted with an instance then those data will never reach your instance. Federated doesn't imply full redundancy

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

This is correct, and it’s also worth noting that the remote comments are not “backfilled”, so you don’t get to read all the old stuff