#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 @[email protected] or @[email protected] is going to get HOSED on the regular.
What does hosed mean, technically?
Lots of traffic, lots of posts, lots of comments, … That’s going to need more storage, more bandwidth, more CPU power, higher running costs. The original instance hosting the community bears a higher load than the instances that duplicate it.
Ideally, there would be a way to more evenly distribute this load across instances according to their resources, but from my (currently limited) knowledge, I don’t think Lemmy/ActivityPub is really geared for that kind of distributed computing, and currently I don’t believe that there’s a way to move subs between instances to offload them (although I believe some people may be working on that).
Perhaps the Lemmy back-end could use a distributed architecture for serving requests and storage, such that anyone could run a backend server to donate resources without necessarily hosting an instance.
For example, I currently have access to a fairly powerful spare server. I’m reluctant to host a Lemmy instance on it as I can’t guarantee its availability in the long term (so any communities/user accounts would be lost when it goes down), but while it’s available I’d happily donate CPU/storage/bandwidth to a Lemmy cloud, if such a thing existed.
There are pros and cons to this approach, but it might be worth considering as Lemmy grows in popularity.
I don’t think it’s a problem. If you weren’t using activity pub and just something like reddit then if you were reddit (the sysadmin) you’d also deal with having to scale if your community gets really popular
Stuff that gets linked to also has the same problem
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/mastodon-stampede/
(Btw I don’t like jwz but he mentions it here)
I think they meant like “overloaded”, like a hose spraying water, but the water being users from all around the fediverse