Are the registry procedures causing the problem? Since most of my communities are on lemmy.ml, wouldn’t I still be using lemmy.lm’s bandwidth? Or is it more crucial to ensure that the communities are distributed more evenly across different instances?

  • pootedesu@latte.isnot.coffeeEnglish
    49·
    2 years ago

    To get serious about distribution, I think there needs to be a few features implemented;

    • User migration. Allow people who find themselves on an overstuffed server to migrate to a different instance
    • Community grouping / merging. If there are multiple communities for the exact same thing, allow the mods to group them or merge them to not fracture the user base
    • User data import / export or cloud backup to a personal provider. If one day your server instance just disappears, it would be nice to know I have a backup of my user data, subscribed communities, saved posts and comments, and maybe a way to relink to my old posts and comments across the fediverse.

    Just a few ideas I was thinking about that could possibly help users move around.

    • wia@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      17·
      2 years ago

      I find it strange that anything lives on a single server at all. It’s wasting one of the best parts of being peer to peer. Redundancy. Every server should just be sharing the ultimate load and hosting parity so nothing can be truly lost when someone decides they’re done with their side project…

      • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.comEnglish
        15·
        2 years ago

        It doesn’t really. I’m viewing this post from my instance, which has saved a copy of this post from lemmy.ml

        Me viewing this post doesn’t hit lemmy.ml at all, although making this comment will.

          • aponigricon@beehaw.orgEnglish
            10·
            2 years ago

            All the users and communities registered there will cease being able to connect to the rest of the network, but the data should still be cached on all the other servers.

            • tiwenty@lemmy.worldEnglish
              3·
              2 years ago

              The keyword is “cache”. Lemmy doesn’t guarantee the cache, so if an instance X would go down permanently, you would eventually lose this data.

              • aponigricon@beehaw.orgEnglish
                2·
                2 years ago

                My presumption was that with over 200 instances, maybe over 1000 in the near future, all the old data should be collectable in theory without loss. But you’re right, there’s no guarantee of this.

          • bdonvr@lemmy.rogers-net.comEnglish
            5·
            2 years ago

            Media from users of lemmy.ml won’t load. You wouldn’t be able to subscribe to communities on lemmy.ml. But I think every other instance would show cached data and hold any new comments/posts/votes to sync when lemmy.ml comes back up. I’m not sure how long that cache is kept.

    • RadDevon@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      I would add to this community migration, which will be important as instances start going offline. User migration is great, but, whereas on Mastodon, the content lives on the user, I believe here it lives on the community.

    • President_Pyrus@feddit.dkEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      Yeah. I like being able to join an instance. But I would really like to be able to backup my profile and to be able to transfer it in the future. It would be ideal to be able to just spin up a raspberry pi, and transfer my account to it at some point.

    • wia@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      I think we want communities to spread out more than users.

      Unfortunately if the users are there then they create the communities. So really people just need to spread out.

      Migrating means losing a few things you’ve made or commented on. We’re so young that shouldn’t be such a big deal yet though.

      This l load balancing will have to be automated sooner or later (sooner hopefully) because it’s gonna be problematic…