cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2357075
It seems that self hosting, for oneself, a federated service, like Lemmy, would only serve to increase the traffic in the network, and not actually serve the purpose of load balancing between servers.
As far as I understand it, the way federation is supposed to work is that the servers cache all the content locally to then serve to the people that are registered to that server. In doing so, the servers only have to transmit a minimal amount of data between themselves which lowers the overhead for small servers – this then means that a small server doesn’t get overwhelmed by a ton of people requesting from it. Now, if, instead, you have everyone self hosting their own server, you go right back to having everyone sending a ton of requests to small servers, thereby overwhelming them. It seems that it’s really only beneficial to the network if you have, say, hundreds of medium sized servers instead of, say, thousands, of very small servers. While there is the resilience factor, the overhead of the network would be rather overwhelming.
Perhaps one possibility of fixing this is to use some form of load balancer like IPFS to distribute the requests more evenly, but I am no where even remotely close to being knowledgeable enough in that to say anything definitively.
Every instance just needs to store the communities they use, just like now. But once cached, any other instance could grab those messages from any of those instances. It’d be a peer to peer sort of organization.
I can think of lots of caveats regarding freshness of content and trust and ensuring the tree of instances is auto organized to minimize depth. Maybe for trust you could have signatures for all content signed using keys that every instance could pull from the original instance just once every now and then.
Upvotes and responses would just travel up the tree in the reverse trip from the way content came down.
But, I think it’s similar to other things that already exist. These problems seem solvable.
The biggest issue I see is edits percolating through the network slowly or not at all, but I’m sure that’s not an insurmountable problem