Does it really spread out the load? Every instance will want to connect to the larger instances and replicate their data, or the larger instances could hug the smaller ones to death if a popular post gets noticed. I am spitballing, but from what I understand more instances means inducing larger and larger loads on everyone.
I suspect/hope most of reddits infra costs mostly come from massive processes they run to consume and correlate user data into sellable data, or the massive moderator tools using full-text search they probably use to hunt down undesirables.
I feel like just serving up text based information shouldn’t be that intensive if done right. But I definitely don’t have the experience to say so for a program handling millions of requests.
If Lemmy gets big enough, google will work on any customized scraping of the fediverse they need to add in, because it’ll be in their best interest. They might already be able to since Lemmy isn’t private for non-logged in users.
Use Tor
Then use Tor if you’re truly scared
Good luck building a performant version.
Although I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t built a Tor version of Lemmy/mastodon yet… imagining no home instance control, you’re just donating hosting to a truly decentralized website that nobody controls but anyone can post to. It would be the ultimate dissent tool.
That’s how it’s always going to work especially politically, and that’s not necessarily a negative in a decentralized model like Lemmy.
I think those users who live under oppressive governments should be used to using tools like Tor and accounts with a proton email to interact on the internet.
The author is directly saying that the more instances you have, the higher load on each of them. Because they’re all replicating and sending traffic to each other. Then again I don’t know enough to verify that, and Lemmy seems to be working just fine for me for the past week.
He seems to know what he’s talking about and hosted his own instance for a long time, why specifically do you distrust the author?
The question then is why do they feel they need to moderate so hard instead of letting downvotes/individual blocking/subscriptions do most of the work, and why don’t they have individual sub mods who can handle policing their own subs
Can I post here from this instance?
edit: cool
Very insightful, thanks