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?

  • @imaqtpieAEnglish
    4•11 months ago

    Also coming from the sh.itjust.works instance.

    My question is how the broader/larger communities are going to be handled. Which server has the responsibility of hosting large general purpose discussion communities? Because 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.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•11 months 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.

      • @imaqtpieAEnglish
        3•11 months 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

        • @[email protected]English
          2•11 months 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.

          • @imaqtpieAEnglish
            1•11 months ago

            I largely agree with your assessment. Its not necessarily a problem in the long run to have multiple local communities. I guess I’m still trying to wrap my head around how this is all going to work.

            I still think that it’s too confusing to newcomers at the moment. For instance, I want to talk about soccer, but I have no idea where to find such a community. I’m not going to start a community because I’m lazy and I assume it will fail. Or perhaps I want to look at memes, and I find a meme community but it’s relatively small and inactive. There are 10 other meme communities in different instances, and the combined content would have satiated me, but there is no easy way for me view or find them, so I simply give up.

            It’s crucial to direct new users to active communities before they abandon the platform entirely. Within the context of the current reddit exodus, we should be trying to harness the seeds of as many communities as possible, so that they might take root and grow on this platform. The current structure of the fediverse is not very conducive to doing so.

            The solution might be as simple as a good tutorial with a list of recommended communities. Btw you’re a legend, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain and discuss this. I also wrote an entire response longer than this and it was lost to the ether(my spotty wifi), so I had to rewrite this as best as I could.

            • @[email protected]English
              4•11 months ago

              I still think that it’s too confusing to newcomers at the moment. For instance, I want to talk about soccer, but I have no idea where to find such a community.

              Yeah, agree. I don’t think there are easy answers though. There is a /communities/ url at each instance, which would be a lot more useful if it was populated with the list of all communities the instance federated with. I think think the devs were nervous about that list being too expensive to federate properly, but it doesn’t feel to me like it should be a major problem.

              Have you found https://browse.feddit.de/ yet? That is the Big List of communities. It’s still quite obtuse how you subscribe to them if you’re the first on your server to do so… but it’s at least a place to look.

              There’s also (just as of today) lemmy.directory. This is an instance where somebody is attempting to subscribe to every lemmy community in order to create an /r/all equivalent. So browsing https://lemmy.directory/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1 will show you the firehose of posts from which you might pick out some communities that interest you. And https://lemmy.directory/communities/listing_type/All/page/1 should actually be a complete list of all communities as well, via the native lemmy community browser.

              These are all suggestions to help you personally, but they don’t invalidate your critique that community discovery is like… way too hard. It’s true.

              Edit: Here’s a baller tutorial on community setup and discovery that includes how to subscribe to a remote community that no one else on your instance has found yet: https://sh.itjust.works/post/9162

              Btw you’re a legend, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain and discuss this.

              No sweat, I’m just trying to help people find ways to stick around my making their first days a little less confusing. Because the system overall isn’t easy, it helps to have a buddy while you’re getting your sea legs. Just trying to be that buddy in the hopes that it makes for a more lively place for me too once people get settled.

              Cheers, mate.

      • NameChecksOutEnglish
        2•11 months 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.