Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
It’s a bit worse than that actually. I’m now seeing several communities with exactly the same name that originate on different servers - so clearly Lemmy doesn’t have a rule about duplication once you cross a server boundary. That’s going to get unwieldy quite fast particularly if, I dunno, “Aww” gets popular on two separate servers at the same time - I guess I’ll have to subscribe to both…
This is a feature, not a bug. But we definitely need a solution to make subscribing/coalescing them easier for users. Mastodon allows subscribing to topics (hashtags) - I think something similar is needed here, but that will evolve naturally over time.
Yes. This is 100% necessary. Otherwise giant communities would be built and probably all on lemmy.ml