this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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General Discussion
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As someone who's new to the fediverse, can you (or others) explain a bit more about how the costs of an instance might affect us? I was pondering this a bit yesterday; at the end of the day, hosting an interactive site at scale can get very expensive.
Specifically:
Federation addresses the cost of large scale hosting by allowing smaller severs (with less users) to connect and form a greater whole. While a flagship Lemmy instance will form and likely already has with .world, in an ideal world users are spread across variety of different instances. In an even more ideal, different topics will have their own instances and general purpose ones are secondary. If you want anime you to to lemmyime, if you want recipes you to lemmecipes. Not, if you want anime and recipes go to lemmy.world. Essentially you want to spread the burden as evenly as possible.
With instances closing, as it stands you lose your account and all things tied to it. Lemmy is still new and I image this will be addressed with something like account migration. So for now, don't get too attached to any singular account. I've recently switched my browsing from lemmy.world to lemm.ee, but remember I still have access to all content from lemmy.world and other instances (addressing your point about more content and engagement).
It's perfectly fine to use large instances, they're likely to have solid footing. Just know theirs going to be growing pains as Reddit becomes more shite. Donate if you can.
Gotcha. Thanks for the insight. I'm definitely curious to see how well the "donate to keep the lights on" model works out. It's likely that the people joining right now are passionate and enough are willing to donate, but we'll see if that trend works out. I think it could, with the more specific instances. Probably people are more willing to foot the bill for a topic they are passionate about, rather than for a bigger, more general instance. Anyway, we'll see!
Ah, one follow up question about instances closing: what happens to the content that originates from that instance? Poof? Or does the federation model preserve it somehow?
All the content disappears along with it.
The first two points could be answered better by other people than me, since I'm not super sure on them either. But the third one is basically that. You can subscribe to all other instances' communities regardless of which community you make an account on, so the lemmy model/fediverse itself is the solution/answer to how distributing wouldn't make you lose any data. As long as even one person from your instance is subscribed to a particular community on a particular instance, that content will show up on your instance too, it's basically instances that subscribe to each other. Having bigger instances doesn't really affect on the amount of in-house content as much as the costs of keeping up with it.
Interesting. I didn't realize that user subscriptions are the connections across instances that drive the content. Is there a good fediverse write up that explains this stuff?
I've only read about it through various posts and discussions on lemmy itself, on their home instance and a couple others. Have yet to understand the ActivityPub model, even after looking at the code for a bit. If I find some clear documentation or post about it, I'll share!