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Lemmy Federation Architecture Change Proposal (github.com)

submitted 2 years ago by xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com to c/technology@beehaw.org

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let's work on a solution to this problem together.

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[–] bdonvr@thelemmy.club 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Apologies if I came off as hostile.

I mean I get what you're saying - I just don't see the practical use. The centralized hub replication servers would have to basically foot a huge bill for the fediverse, and do so silently and invisibly to the end user. As it is, most instances run on goodwill or donations. A silent, invisible server is hard to gather donations for. Who would run them?

Furthermore the topology you propose is essentially what we already have. A few large instances hold most of the largest communities. I don't see that changing. This brings a fairly good balance - smaller instances pretty much only have to listen for updates from a few other instances, only the big instances are doing the hard work of notifying hundreds of others. They are already our "hubs". Small instances really hardly do practically any hard work, the one I run for example just listens to maybe a dozen instances send updates, and occasionally sends out an update when one of my users interacts.

I suppose I just don't understand how this could be implemented in practice- or rather how it could be useful to do so. It would strictly enforce a sort of centralization that right now is only a natural consequence of user behavior, while seemingly only bringing theoretical benefits unlikely to be realized.