Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.

I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?

Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?

Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?

I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.

I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?

Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    … it seems like servers are actively incentivized to limit their size and you end up with many smaller mirrored communities but no realistic path to a reddit style overarching open forum about movies, or soccer, for example.

    This is not really true. You’re not limited to participating in communities (aka subreddits) on the server where your account is. My account is on lemmy.world, yours is on sh.itjust.works, we’re both commenting in a community that’s homed to lemmy.ml. The community can be much larger than the server, you don’t need to be an instance with lots of registered users in order to host a large community.

    • NameChecksOut@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’ll be interesting to see how similar communities from different instances will work out. I’ve noticed a lot of Technology instances from beehaw.org, lemmy.ml, lemmy.ca, and others.

      How will the fediverse as a whole determine which Technology instance is the “main” one? I assume it’ll be whichever one has the largest subscriber count accumulated over time.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for the response. EDIT: I read another comment (also from you) about the way federation actually works and I was totally wrong in my assumptions so I deleted them. I suppose I should be leaving these questions up to the people building the platform, rather than a layperson such as myself.

      Can’t help but ask though, is the federation somewhat comparable to a blockchain? In a blockchain each member has a full copy of the chain, and in the federation each instance has a copy of all parts of the chain it cares about. If one peer goes down, the other peers can continue to function. Cool.

      This comment should be stickied or included in some sort of tutorial though.

      https://lemmy.world/comment/20357

      I found another thread discussing this topic and most people seem to expect that there will be natural consolidation and fragmentation of communities over time. There was also the suggestion that individual communities could federate such that posts from two different meme communities in different instances could be merged into the same feed on the user end, which sounds like a pretty good compromise.

      https://lemmy.ml/post/1163258

      • PriorProject@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Can’t help but ask though, is the federation somewhat comparable to a blockchain?

        Both ecosystems involve large number of independent peers that must coordinate without a leader and both were designed in the same decade. There are some similarities. There are also some big differences. I wouldn’t say that either needs to be more like the other than it is, they address different use-cases.

        … individual communities could federate such that posts from two different meme communities in different instances could be merged into the same feed on the user end…

        I’m not real convinced this is all that useful for the steady state. technology@beehaw.org and technology@lemmy.ml are not meaningfully different than /r/technology and /r/tech (both of which are real subreddits, despite what many are saying… Reddit is FULL of duplicative subreddits. It’s just that one usually is much bigger and dominates). The main case I could see for what you’re describing would be community transfer or shutdown. If admins are killing a server, or mods of the smaller community give up… it might be cool to migrate subs/posts en-masse to a new community and shut down the old one. There there’s just no need to have two local communities that both remain active but are somehow “merged” in federation. That is indistinguishable from the scenario where everyone subs to one of the two communities without regard for where the community is hosted.