Wouldn’t it all just come crumbling down if every user spun up a server?
this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Probably, but we know that this is only a hypothetical question because in reality this will never happen.
Why is that?
As I understand it, fediverse has a lot of syncing overhead (it takes a lot of bandwidth and processing to share content between all the servers). The more servers there are, the more overhead is used for syncing.
While lots of servers is good for resilience, and diversification of communities, going to the extent of every individual hosting a server seems like an overburdensome extreme.
It's also asking way too fucking much of the average person. Running multiple fediverse instances is basically a hobby and I barely have time for the hobbies I already have (and actually enjoy). It also is probably at least $100-200/year extra financial commitment in hosting and I'm being conservative on that number.
I'll stick to using existing instances, tyvm
I have not seen anyone in this thread ask for people to run their individual instance, but I do get your point
Edit: I know how costly and bothersome it is, I host my fair share of stuff, specifically this Lemmy instance too
The video we're commenting on has the description text
"To really own your content, I think you need to host it yourself. The fediverse makes it possible."
And hosting your own content is just not a great option for most. That's all I'm saying.
oh alright! didn't notice that, thanks for making me notice :3
not that it would ever happen at critical mass, but i think there’s a valid criticism here.
when i first heard about federated platforms my initial impression was that it was more of a “hub and spoke” system than the free-for-all it currently is. i still think there’s some merit to having a few larger “parent” instances that handle the federation between each other, while individual instances pull federation via their “parent” instance. seems like this approach would help reduce some of that overhead, but that does jeopardize the open nature of the protocol.
it’s a tough thing to balance.