#lemmy/#kbin has a problem that #mastodon hasn’t even attempted to solve; groups and what happens when they get popular.
#Communities, #groups, #magazines, whatever they are called are implemented as #Actors in #ActivityPub. They are basically just *very* popular users who boost a *lot*.
You can’t just distribute them across instances the way normal actors do. Whichever server hosts @technology@lemmy.ml or @technology@beehaw.org is going to get HOSED on the regular.
Did you post this from Mastodon? I wish I could tell where this came from.
Basically if I understand this right, if you have an instance with a very popular community on it. It is likely that it will need some massive infrastructure scaling if it wants to handle the enormous amount of world wide traffic?
Yes. If you run the server, then you are the source of truth of that community. All other servers that federate your community query your server to access the community and show it to their users.
So if you run a server and a community explodes there, you might only have 500 users on your instance, but you might have 50k users reading that community and interacting with it from other Lemmy instances, thus your server needs to scale to 50k users worth.
And ever more essential, your server is the source of truth of that community. So if your server is hacked or corrupted or deleted, that community is gone. Other instances don’t mirror it (except for temporary caching), so the Lemmy network essentially is a trust network of other people maintaining servers long term (and each inventing a monetary system to pay for it). I still think the network might be better than a centralized system like reddit, but it definitely has a lot of growing and policies that need to be sorted out very soon
So are these other servers just routing requests from their users to your server’s community? Or are they actually copying everything over every so often (caching) and serving up the requests themselves? How real time is it, I guess is what I’m asking?
Isn’t that what this colourful icon in Lemmy is for? It appears to link to the original source of the post or comment: