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Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What would happen if instead of users swarming existing servers when a fediverse service was put in the spotlight, each user spun up their own micro-instance and tried to federate with existing servers?

There's always the odd person who decides to host a personal fediverse service in their homelab for themselves, but would the fediverse work if that was actually the primary mode of interaction? Or would it fail in a similar way to now where the servers which receive the most federation requests need to scale up?

Presumably the failure modes for federation are easier to scale than browser requests since it's an async process.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dont think so. As an example, take the [email protected] community for example. It can have say 1000 subscribers from lemmy.ml but only needs to send content to lemmy.ml once as it comes in. All 1000 subscribers see the cache copy from lemmy.ml and a message is only sent back to beehaw.org for comments, votes, etc. With everyone having their own instance beehaw.org would have to send updates to each one instead of sending an update to one instance and 100 users seeing it. A good level to strive for is many small communities of say a few thousand (1-5 thousand or so). That way one single server doesnt get to massive but federation requests arent overwhelming instances either

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So let's say we want to scale up to several million users - what would that look like?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Well, if we wanted say 50 million users at 5000 users per instance we would have 10000 instances. If we wanted 1 billion users we would have 200 thousand instances