this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (8 children)

You are right. On the one hand, it's kind of bad, naive distributed architecture (my day job), it could have been done much better. On the other hand, the more important point is that it demonstrates an alternative to centralized. We'll learn a lot about usage patterns here, get new ideas, and either improve Lemmy or build something better from the ground up. Big thanks to Reddit for driving users this way to test scalability and get much better knowledge of usage.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not distributed architecture as you normally think it - it's a decentralised federation. It's an important distinction from your typical distributed architecture app.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you explain what's the difference?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A distributed architecture generally refers to a single application or service designed to be resilient to individual data center failures. For example, Reddit, a centralized application controlled by Reddit itself, operates data centers around the world to process user transactions. In the event of an outage in a specific location, such as California, Reddit would still be able to function because its infrastructure for handling user requests and serving data would automatically switch to other functioning data centers elsewhere, like Nevada, Arizona, or Washington. This is an example of a distributed architecture.

On the other hand, a decentralized federation does not consist of a single application. Instead, it involves a software platform like Lemmy, which is hosted on multiple individual hosts. When a user signs up with one host, they can interact with users from other hosts, but each host manages its own infrastructure. For instance, someone could host a Lemmy instance on an old laptop they found in their closet and name it ballsuckers.com, while another person could host a Lemmy instance in the cloud with a properly designed distributed architecture and name it bingbong.com. Each host is responsible for managing its own instance. Users from both instances can interact with each other, but if, for example, the hard drive of ballsuckers.com were to fail, the entire ballsuckers.com instance would go down. However, this would not affect bingbong.com because its infrastructure is separate and managed independently.

I hope this helps!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What makes a distributed system good that Lemmy hasn't done? Seems like a pretty robust system to me, seems like scaling issues are on the instance host themself. With Reddit's experience, I don't see how there are issues

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

almost. It's actually worse than that - when you subscribe to a community from your server it will fetch like 20 posts and that's it, you'll get only new stuff after that, so there's no possibility to do a full mirror of selfhosted, for example, if you started your instance today and didn't fetch posts and comments manually.

ActivityPub per se is just a spec on s2s/s2c communication, which is not a great thing since in many cases it assumes single source of truth, which potentially puts huge load on more popular instances.

I think a quick and dirty hack to this could be the following - each linked instance may maintain cache of announces (so there would be benefit of just forwarding original http signed requests w/o being afraid of malicious actor), which your instance could pull, this way you could populate your mirror without overloading the original source.
Distributed activities propagation though... Let's say there are some design steps involved to make this truly distributed, however I feel like it's possible.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What's the alternative? You go full-banana decentralised or mega-site Reddit. I think Lemmy is a nice middle ground

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Proper data model would be a start, i.e. public-key based identities instead of just the old name@server. That way you could hop from server to server and still be the same account. Would make the whole thing a hell of a lot more robust, as in case of server failure could just continue as if nothing happened on another server.

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

That's a pretty cool idea! Keybase and SIWE were getting there, but hasn't really taken off in a big way yet

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

They are not useless, if the users would actually spread out among them. Each server has its limits.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I just commented on this in another thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/76011

TL;DR: The server-to-client interactions on Lemmy are a lot heavier than the server-to-server interactions, so even if you're just using your own server to interact with communities on other servers, it should still take load off of the servers you would have been using directly.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's news to me. I thought serverto-server interactions would be heavier since other instances will keep fetching contents from your instance once they start federating. I guess it's better to join less populated instances instead of crowding on a single instance.

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

I'm quite worried of how well this federation system will work in the long run, especially when more people coming from Rexxit. As people make more post/comments, every federated instance will have to cache more redundant contents from each other, which also will use more storage thus increasing the fee of every instance hoster. There's also another problem of visibility in search engines. Because Lemmy/Kbin can be hosted by anyone, it makes searching on a specific domain impossible, unlike how I can just add "reddit" in the search query. Also since there are multiple Lemmy/Kbin instances, there's a chance there'll be similar communities spread over, fragmenting the communities even further. Until they can find a way to fix those problem, I don't think federation is suited for large scale communities.

As for fragmentation problem, maybe adding a global search for communities like this will help reducing fragmentation. Users can still make their own community in their instance, while other people who don't need to can easily find the community they want.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I don't think that there are thousands. The fediverse stat's show about 300 servers, 200 or so made in the last week.

At that rate, it is not too bad. I expect there will be a plateau at some point, relatively soon, where the need for new ones stop, and the experimental ones disappear.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A network of (“thousands of”) servers has — like most things — pros and cons.

Some of the pros are:

  • The network is more resiliant against outages. If lemmy.ml is down, all other users can still access the network.
  • It's hard to take legal action against the network or to buy it out (like Big Players™ like to do to get rid of potential competitors).
  • It allows various similar or even conflicting moderation policies. The network, i.e. the infrastructure doesn't allow or prohibit any specific opinion (the communities do).
  • It allows for different ways to pay the bills: goodwill of the admin, donaitions, ads, fee or selfhosting. The latter also allows great control over the data so you control your privacy.

Some of the cons are:

  • Content is replicated across servers, which increases the total amount of data stored.
  • Latency and speed suffer.
  • Interoperability with the wider Fediverse is less than 100%, which can create confusion and frustration.
  • Discovery is more difficult.
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This has definitely been a problem with communities being created on the bigger instances and not utilising smaller instances. Happy for someone to say I'm wrong etc, but I think there would be merit in capping instances to x number of users or communities, to force the user base to spread out.

Also, the way signups work, (ie you find a community you like then click sign up but that signs you up to that instance), further exacerbates the issue and the confusion around how federation works. The sign up links on each instance should lead either to a page with an instance finder, or to a random instance that matches the profile of, and is already federated with, the instance you were on. Otherwise the larger instances have a monopoly and are just going to lead to a bad user experience when they can't cope with the traffic.

It's a self defeating prophecy if users only want to sign up to the instances with the big communities, because then everyone is going to keep creating communities there and nobody is going to want to join a smaller instance.

I might be talking nonsense and am happy to be told why that is all wrong :)

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

Yes, there should be instance caps, and they should be visible to users.

That way users can scale, choose, without much thinking.

This same techinque works everywhere, for example MMO games. You have availability visible and choose servers according to it.

This would fix scaling partially without much technical changes.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've created my own instance in order to not create more load on others and it took a minute to realise I needed to populate it myself, would be nice to have a default view aggregating popular posts etc. across instances. But maybe I'm just asking for too much hehe

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

That's an interesting idea. Maybe you could even choose the "default subs" for your instance from across lemmy.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Every server just has a cache … there is no profit for the whole network …

I wouldn't say that caching is no profit. Yesterday there were several times when lemmy.ml was struggling or effectively down for some people, but despite complaints over there I could read lemmy.ml communities just fine through my instance. Caching meant that I was isolated from the service interruption, and the lemmy.ml server was isolated from my contribution to its load.

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

Based on the bit of research I have done, along with creating https://lemmyonline.com/

It seems you are correct. A small handful of servers contains roughly 95% of the user-base.

I think the intended way for this to work, certain communities can be hosted on their own servers. However, it appears most of the popular communities migrating away from reddit, all flocked to lemmy.world, which is likely contributing to it being overloaded.

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