this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Ideally, I think no one instance should have a million users to begin with.
User caps might be a good way to decentralize and ensure that we don't end up with just a few mega-instances. If there were a page showing available instances with percent of max users then people could use that when selecting.
Ideally, yes. If that can be the reality, and I suppose that is how it should would with federation, then server costs should never get out of hand.
For that to happen, I believe that interacting with people from other instances and moving your community and account from one instance to another have to become possible / easier.
At present, people flock to the instances with most users as those often have more local content (local content is generally easier to find than federated content) and they often have a smaller risk of shutting down. If I create a community on a smaller instance, the chance of it being found and interacted with are also much smaller than if it had been created on a bigger instance (because of, as I said, local content being user to find).
Sure, I can create an account on myfirstlemmyinstance.com (example URL, not an actual instance) with 10 users, but if my instance decides to shut down, my community of, say, 500 users will now have to move somewhere else and all old content will be deleted.
A “transfer my community” feature that allowed an entire community to be moved between instances would certainly help. That’s a great idea.
From what I’ve seen so far looking through the Postgres db, every instance has data from most other instances. I see users in my local Postgres db from other instances. So, theoretically moving a community from one instance to another could be as simple as changing a few values in the database. Of course in practice it’s never that simple. 😀
Wouldn't it require changing all those values in the database of all instances with subscribers to that community?
Good question. I don’t know. Hypothetically speaking, if the parent instance of the community changes the relevant data in the database to another instance, would federation take over and automatically propagate the change? 🤷🏻♂️
Sounds like an interesting experiment at least, or a possible major bug waiting to happen.
Idk for everyone else, but when I was on reddit once I had set up the subreddits I wanted to see, I really spent 99% on my time on just those. Every so often I would leave or join subreddits but it was rare. Like if people are not doing searches as often then the lag is more tolerable. Plus, won't content from larger and older instances be indexed by search engines eventually? Right now because so many communities are being created on so many different instances, it's more obvious that the searching is laggy but things will surely settle down as time passes.