Comment on Why are peole hating on .world?
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months agoBack when I read it was just starting to fall as shit, I had already been dipping my toes in the mastodon water, and while I really liked the instance I was on it did not have enough people on it to properly surface good collections of off node traffic.
Knowing that Mastodon had the problem, I didn’t dick around with smaller nodes. To be honest it’s still a fight if you’re on a node with only a handful of people, you have to do something to mitigate the lack of community traffic in the face of lacking discoverability.
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 months ago
People are doing that here though - e.g. the user Blaze made accounts on basically every instance, and subscribed to every community. This gets around the limitation where at least one user of an instance must subscribe to a community before it will even so much as show up for others to also subscribe. Really the developers should have made better automation so that this was not necessary, but… anyway it works, for now:-).
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 2 months ago
That’s actually really terrible for federation performance, particularly because lemmy doesn’t do batch synchronization. So basically every comment, post, like, and community is being sent to all Lemmy servers as individual sequential requests. That’s a lot to handle.
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 months ago
Supposedly that will change with v0.19.6 (A recent discussion about that here: feddit.org/post/3524876), but yeah it’s causing smaller instances such as Aussie.Zone to have delays of over 7 days.
I also expressed disbelief that this info would not be bundled somehow - at least put together a package for everything that happened across the entire instance in one second, or one minute could be far better, for servers that can’t handle the per-second traffic?
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 2 months ago
Well that’s good!
And right, I had the exact same thought… It seems like the lemmy devs are not highly experienced web developers, at least not that have worked on anything at the scale lemmy became after the Reddit exodus.
can@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
They’d a whole (opt-in) service for it
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 months ago
That’s nice! ☺️
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months ago
I feel like ActivityPub implemented federation in a really weird way, and that’s what causes problems like @linearchaos@lemmy.world is reporting, or the issue that Blaze is addressing through multi-accounting. Perhaps we shouldn’t be sharing content across instances but only credentials.
For example. If you’re registered to instance A, and B federates with A, then B would let you post from your A account as if you were registered to B. Then let the retrieval of the content of different instances up to the front-end, instead of mirroring it.
OpenStars@discuss.online 2 months ago
No, the whole point for the federation is to share the content. For one, it allows redundancy so that if a rogue mod or admin decided to delete a bunch of stuff, then every other instance still retains copies of what came from it.
But that said, having to keep everything up to the second, in batches of a single action, is extremely limiting. If I downvote someone with an accidental button press, then undownvote them, then upvote - that could have been just one net interaction to send, but instead it is three.
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Redundancy is better handled through specialised mirrors, similar in spirit to reveddit. That would be even more transparent than the current system - as the mirrors could translate actions like content removal into content highlighting, so you’d see what was removed within the original context. This would also throw the burden associated with redundancy (transmission, storage, removal of clearly illegal content) into a few machines, instead of the whole network.
I’m aware that it’s a weaker form of federation than the current one but, as long as the front-end handles simultaneous multi-account and merges the feeds of the instances that you’re registered to, it’s already addressing the main needs:
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Ease discovery of federated communities has been funded: join-lemmy.org/…/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_f…
lvxferre@mander.xyz 2 months ago
That’s some great news! It’s great to see that the issues are being ironed out.