Mastodawn

Averrin Jun 12, 2023

arr all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

arr all these thousands of lemmy servers useless? - Lemmy.world

Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache andthe ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory. Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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hal Jun 12, 2023

Matrix suffers extremely of this issue. It feels like 95% or more are on matrix.org instance. And all major chat rooms are hosted there too.

I think something like a weekly cap for new registrations as an option would be good. With a hint to other instances.

It's kinda the same issue that some games have, like MMOs. People tend to make new accounts on the biggest and overloaded servers because there is the most activity even though stability could be an issue, or login queues.

But that doesn't make sense on matrix or Lemmy. Because you can still access all content no matter where you are.

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zergling_man

And all major chat rooms are hosted there too. That's not how matrix works. Rooms are fully replicated to all participating servers, no single server acts as a point of failure. It also has a resolution system for divergent states; no server has authority over any other. You can add local aliases for any room you're in on your local server without permission from room admins. (... Actually I'd have to doublecheck that. It might be one of the permissions.) You don't even need an alias, the room ID (eg. !BZVTUuEiNmRcbFeLeI:matrix.org) and a server that's currently participating in the room (ie. has that room ID) is enough to join. That's really what aliases are; mapping a name to a room ID on a particular server that is known to be participating. Room IDs include a server name as an anti-collision mechanism, it has no other significance.

It feels like 95% or more are on matrix.org instance. I think it's a bit lower than that. midov is actually pretty big. So's T-AC. (And then there's joe's room directory, which I think is bigger than morg's.) But it's well over 50%, which is disgustingly high. morg should close registrations, and purge dormant accounts/aliases.

a weekly cap for new registrations as an option Extremely good idea.

like MMOs. Funny you mention that, I had a laugh on Witch Weapon when I discovered that my server was frequently getting 10-100x more points in ranking events than other servers (and I was frequently placing top 50 without any of the busted characters). I'd simply chosen the recommended server, which I had assumed was the smallest at the time. Turns out it was just a static value so it had like 50x the population of the other two.

I still miss that game.

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hal Jun 12, 2023

About Matrix and federation/rooms etc.

I know. My point was more like, what if matrix.org goes down tomorrow? My understanding is, nobody can login into their matrix.org accounts, right? But rooms and their admins are tied to that matrix.org account? So even if rooms will still be there because of alias/replicated to other federated instances. Who is gonna maintain it and moderate it then? My guess is, bigger rooms have set admins from different instances because of that?

I mean, I am not so much into matrix, I am more of a XMPP person. I hosted a public matrix synapse. And tbh, it was a real PITA compared to xmpp hosting. But ok, XMPP has other issues, too. So there is that.

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taladar Jun 12, 2023

Trying to host my own Synapse server once for my own use and seeing how it was chewing through every bit of resources on my server while providing an unusable slow experience has pretty much ruined Matrix as a whole for me as well as contributed significantly to my dislike for Python.