I have a domain name that I own but am not making use of and was thinking of setting up my own personal Lemmy instance, partly so I can have a Lemmy id and instance that I can completely control, partly so that I can contribute directly to my hosting cost, and partly because it might be fun to tinker with (or it might just end up being a pain; I’m still trying to figure out which is the case).
However, from this comment it sounds like, rather than contributing to horizontal scaling and easing the load on other servers, I might actually end up increasing the load on other servers by adding yet another server that the other servers have to talk to in order to keep my server updated on the latest comments and posts to which I am subscribed.
So given this, would self-hosting a personal instance actually make things worse for everyone else and thus be an irresponsible action at this time and/or for the foreseeable future? Because the last thing that I want to do is to inadvertently add a burden to the fediverse!
As what I understood, actually it makes things worse. This shouldn’t be the case because the concept of fediverse itself is to have a lot of many instances communicating with each other.
The problem is the Lemmy is still a young project and we weren’t expecting all this explosion in users. activityPub implementation doesn’t scale well for now and so adding a new instance theoretically makes things worse.
But this is something that devs have as a high priority, in my opinion, because is very important to have instances correctly communicating with each other, otherwise the concept of federation falls.
When I first heard of the fediverse without understanding the architecture I envisioned something like torrent networks, where the larger the network the stronger the network. After learning more I’m not sure that’s the case yet. Hopefully that is the endgame.
I would want to be in a place where I could enrich an existing community by self-hosting and synching content of that community and offering my small chunk of bandwidth to that community. I realize there is no community synching between instances, but I feel that’s where it should be to prevent corporate control of communities in the future.
You can read the ActivityPub protocol… I don’t think it will become like bittorrent, as there peer-to-peer concept doesn’t seem to exist in the spec.
Having said that, while we are running into implementation limitations on the larger instances, the problems are being tackled. A couple of us are chatting on
!lemmyperformance@lemmy.mland!lemmyfederation@lemmy.mlto see if we can come up with good ideas to present to the devs to help Lemmy scale. You’re most certainly welcome to join in on the fun!ActivityPub define an inbox forwarding feature. I haven’t dug too deep into Lemmy source code to see if Lemmy implement this, but if it does, this feature would allow more efficient propagation of activities (e.g. A -> B -> C instead of B <- A -> C where A is the originator).