Thanks for the reply. If you don’t mind, I still have few questions.

I understand the value of a distributed architecture and federation. What I wasn’t sure about is the value of tons (thousands? hundreds of thousands? millions?) of small instances vs few hundred or thousand large ones.

This spread out architecture allows for lesser hosting costs per instance and if an instance goes down it does not mean the entire service goes down as a whole.

It seems that federation would put more pressure on all popular instances, no? the more popular an instance, the more likely others to want to federate with it, the more work it needs to do to push data, the more calls, etc. I understand that relays could spread out the load, but you’re just pushing the problem one more level. I already see wildly different numbers of comments on the same thread between the different instances depending on the home vs federated, with low usage (talking about <100 comments). It seems to take a long time for things to sync, and some comments don’t seem to sync.

And while sure, your own personal instance of Lemmy might be up and fine, if the popular instances you federate with are down, you’re essentially cut off still, right?

Additionally, it allows for easier moderation as moderators (admins?) are instance specific. You don’t have to moderate the whole of Lemmy, keeping your own house clean is enough.

You have to moderate any instance you allow to federate with still, right? Like either you lock down which instances you want to federate with (have an allowlist) or you block abusive instances (have a denylist) either way it’s a lot of management still. More flexible, for sure, but not exactly a walk in the park, right?