What would happen if instead of users swarming existing servers when a fediverse service was put in the spotlight, each user spun up their own micro-instance and tried to federate with existing servers?

There’s always the odd person who decides to host a personal fediverse service in their homelab for themselves, but would the fediverse work if that was actually the primary mode of interaction? Or would it fail in a similar way to now where the servers which receive the most federation requests need to scale up?

Presumably the failure modes for federation are easier to scale than browser requests since it’s an async process.

  • Edo78@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    Maybe I’m wrong (I’m on Lemmy since yesterday morning) but if you host your instance you’re only caching the communities you are interested in …if you never care about a community or interacted with an instance then those data will never reach your instance. Federated doesn’t imply full redundancy

    • nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev
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      1 year ago

      This is correct, and it’s also worth noting that the remote comments are not “backfilled”, so you don’t get to read all the old stuff