[Architecture] Hub-Spoke model for federation? · Issue #3245 · LemmyNet/lemmy
github.com
Question One of the biggest issues I am currently seeing with Lemmy, is federation. Either... Federation between instances having issues. Federation is backed up. Federation / Syncing is not scalin...

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245

I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-

But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-

That will require nearly 50 million connections.

Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.

In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).

The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.

Let’s work on a solution to this problem together.

  • HotzillaEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    Load wise, having the hub separated to own server would make scaling easier. So even one hub and one instance solution for large instances could work. For personal instances this solution would be nice, because they could share one hub, and federate through that.

    No one is suggesting here to have any company host the hub.

    • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I know no one is suggesting that - that’s not what I was saying.

      But it also would cost more, and also someone’s got to host it and who is that person? Or is it a collective decision to contribute towards hosting the hub?

      Who gets the rights - whoever has control of the hub, naturally has direct control over their part of the threadiverse.

      While it adds additional load bearing capabilities, it also adds another point of failure for those sites, and potentially even sabotage if disagreement happens.

      After all, someone’s gotta put their name down to hire or buy server capacity for it, even if everyone pays for it and that someone has full control over what goes through the hub.

      Unless we encrypt all data so that the hub is just a dumb relay, that’s not going to work. And even then - you can still tell where the messages come from and slow them or block them at the hub.

      The point of the fediverse is to make it so regular Joe’s can afford to run servers on just their own income or donations, so we can take the corporate out of it. We don’t want to add tol much additional costs - and adding a hub system will do that.