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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Scalability. Most federated Lemmy instances are hobbiest run projects started by every day joes and privacy advocating sysadmins. These instances can handle a modest amount of activity. Lemmy.world is slowing to a crawl and barely working due to being overloaded. At the scale of tens of thousands of active users you NEED proper infrastructure and a dedicated team. These are not things that come easy when the instance generates no revenue besides meager donations. Lemmy.world is looking for on call system operators willing to contribute 5-10 hours per week. Good help is rarely cheap let alone free.
You are exactly correct.
I posted this in response to the DDOS attacks a few weeks ago. Same idea.
"... This is a shame. Hosting a high visibility server is no joke, and I don't envy the admins and the very difficult work they do. It's simultaneously an argument for and against decentralization. For - a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse. Against - it seems as though high visibility communities are potentially fairly easy to target and take down.
I think that decentralization wins out here in the end, but it does feel like there may be a need for some sort of fallback mechanism to be in place at an instance/community level. I suspect this might evolve somehow over time. It would require some way to expand trust between instances and or portability of communities (which could be fraught with user trust/data integrity issues).
If things don't evolve it could grow into a whack-a-mole game for bad actors, or there might need to be more investment into server infrastructure (which could work against decentralization if only because of economies of scale).
Or maybe there's no issue after all? I'm just imagining potential implications of a scaling fediverse - it's fascinating and exciting stuff! ..."
Everyone is a lot safer, faster and less vulnerable by being on smaller servers.
It's not possible to ddos thousands of smaller instances in the same way. And if communities were spread out, taking a few instances down wouldn't even be noticeable.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, maybe not so much as a ton of these smaller instances are consolidated on a just a handful of hosting providers.
When Lemmy.world was ddos'ed, other instances didn't feel any of the effects, despite being on the same hosting provider. So it really matters - spread out :)