118
How will lemmy instances survive if they get too big?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
118 points (93.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
621 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Smaller instances cannot be trusted to have good uptime. For me I have to go down if there is a thunderstorm, need to unplug everything >.< So would need to save individual data to 2-3 smaller instances for it to be reliable.
I hope there might be a community and user transfer functionality. Could spread the load over the currently well hosted but low pop instances. Right now you need to stick with the instance you choose for all eternity :< forever and ever
Why can't they be trusted? They most likely run in the cloud somewhere and won't have any issues staying up. :)
My instance has 100% uptime after a month of use, which is more than the largest instances.
I feel like people mostly leave their small instance alone and don't touch it.
Perhaps just not sure how they are hosted, if they are majority cloud hosted that's a different thing :3 Assumed smaller instances would run on a home server of some kind.
Would be a nice ask lemmy post perhaps ^^
Since you need a fixed ip address and domain name, it usually rules out running at home, also because internet delivery companies usually don't provide very good upload speeds to users at home.
So I think you can trust the uptime for sure, but one risk is that smaller instances may decide to shut down if they don't get any users. So there is that risk... :)
There is some pros of self hosting, outside of it being a fun project. You can get custom emojis (sadly not on the mobile app yet, otherwise there would be a :blobheart: right here) and custom themes ^^
So I don't think most small instances are necessary looking to increase in user size. Or at least that is not my intention.
Yeah themes are fun but I think most people use one of the android apps anyway, and then the local theme doesnt matter there.
But it cant hurt to make the web theme a bit nicer - its currently "functional" but maybe not the best looking. I actually like a lot of whitespace in web design, but a lot of people dont.
One of the suggestions was a gossip protocol, which wouldn't need 100% (or close to 100%) uptime. Wouldn't be outside of the realm of ActivityPub either, it's not specific about how messages can be routed kind of like how Email can be passed around a bunch before actually arriving at their intended destination. It would be a layer on top of AP though so maybe Kbin wouldn't be able to join the network. For communities, the only one I actually saw Nutomic or dessalines be interested in is this fediverse enhancement proposal about making groups in such a way that can be hosted on multiple instances. A few large instances could come together to cohost and spread the load between them.
When you say groups that is communities in lemmy terms? ^^ Not fluent in the terminology but with a functionality like this how would you receive older posts? Seems like newer linked instances would start with a blank slate from the point of "bounding".
Or am I just butchering the meaning with my understanding? hehe
Yes that's right, Lemmy communities are communicated as groups in ActivityPub, so that FEP would be applicable to communities