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.
I’m also running my own instance, very few users and everything is really fast. Because I’m not on the same instance as all those users.
I guess with time, people will understand what I’m talking about. There are no downsides to using an instance with a low amount of users when you have federated technology.
I would love to get more users actually, just to help spread the load and to provide a good experience.
I feel like with lemmy, people are more likely to want to be on the server hosting the communities they care about because there isn’t a way to migrate users between servers in the way that mastodon allows. I’d be somewhat hesitant to trust my online identity with someone who is a relative unknown vs a larger instance with more accountability due to community size and published code of conduct
Same, but the communities will always congregate around one or two big instances because there’s no point building a tiny community with only a few people on your own instance.
What ends up happening is these micro deployments end up just being an identity server and caching layer.