To the newcomers to the fediverse. Don’t let the last few days or even the next few be your only impression on this. When we all came over from twitter it was a shit show and nothing worked right because everything was overwhelmed. Give it a few days. It’ll get better.
It’s already improving, smaller communities becoming more active, which promotes faster federation across smaller server instances. the big guys are upgrading to faster servers, though I need to stress that people shouldn’t all just lump into the big servers, find a local one if you can.
Spreading out is definitely the way to make this thing work. I’m sure there is more that can be implemented to help with federation speed, making sure you have all comments, etc. Those are solved with a monolith instance, but as we see you need a monster server to do it. I think instances averaging less than a few thousand users each will be the way to move forward.
Yep, if we had a way to migrate users between instances (technically possible, but not implemented) there could possibly even be a way to shuffle users off overloaded servers automatically in the future, like a form of load balancing.
Allowing users to migrate as seamlessly as possible between instances is just an important part of making decentralization really effective too — it only really means something that it’s possible to move to a different instance with a different culture and set of rules, norms, moderation style, etc, without losing access to the network as a whole if it’s easy to do so, because only then does it become a real possibility for counterbalancing the power of any given instance.
Love that idea. Servers could distinguish if they want to be a general ‘home instance’ for users, and those that opt in could communicate with each other and push accounts around as necessary. Servers could calculate their likelihood to accept a new incoming account based on some heuristics the admin could set, with sensible defaults. That way the system would self-balance itself as new instances appear and as mature ones reach capacity. Of course for that to work there would have to be some central authority keeping track of account locations for login purposes.
I’ve been having a blast… I think this place is fully viable. QOL type polishing and some technical refinement sure but this is something special.
And for some reason everyone (most) is really friendly, I used to lurk a lot on Reddit, here I can actually chat with people.
Amen! This movement is far more about he actual implications of federation, not that it isn’t there yet. If we have any chance to live in a world not controlled by government/corporate greed, then we have to start trusting in one another and helping to support an internet that we all control and can take part in.
Any influx like this is a clusterfuck. It’s just the way it is. But this community already feels good. And it seems like those on the backend are doing everything they can. So patience it is, because this could be great.
I love being a part of something that isn’t extremely large. All of the issues I’ve been having just add to the charm. I don’t care if everything doesn’t work right away. I enjoy lemmy because it is open source.
