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How does federation work?
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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It's dumb that someone needs to interact with community in order for it to federate with your instance. Like, how are you supposed to find it in the first place? It makes it difficult for communities to grow on instances that are not mainstream which makes decentralization useless.
I just did some math and assumed there are 700 (some instances are blocking other instances) instances and 12 000 communities. 700*12 000 = 8 400 000, users across the platform need to copy url of community and paste it into search this many times to make the platform fully federate with everything. Numbers were taken from here: https://lemmyverse.net/
this number is only completely relevant for someone on an instance all by themselves or with no communities at all. And discounts instances that are or will de-federate either partially or fully. It also assumes some need to be a part of all 12,000 communities. I think tools like you linked solve this issue anyway. I personally believe to a certain extent every community being federated to every instance kind of defeats the purpose of federalization.
But that's not my point though? The point is to federate with all sublemmies of FEDERATED instances. The problem is that when you federate other instance it doesn't federate sublemmies of that instance automatically which limits interactions between instances by a HUGE amount
It's a risk reward question then. That would 100% slowdown the initial federation if it needed to pull in every community and even if that was accepted, should every instance constantly poll any instance it knows about for new communities? Also you aren't guaranteed to need all those instances anyway and then that's just a waste of space and processing power. Correct, it limits interactions but only to what's necessary which allows instances to be ran on lower powered hardware, allowing more people to join in. With the possibility of third party tools I don't see much of an upside of building that into lemmy.