Can Lemmy have distributed communities (lemmy.fmhy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by Mastersord@lemmy.fmhy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I was thinking about this in regards to all the “defederation” posts.

Let’s say you spin up a server and over night it gets super popular and grows enormous. Now your yearly expenses shoot up and you’re forced to either look for a new host or shut down.

Now what if instead, you could get a few other people to spin up more small instances and distribute parts of your biggest communities to them, however the users don’t notice because The communities are looking across instances instead of within their home instance?

That’s the idea at least. This would allow for many things but most importantly, it would make things a bit more manageable. Thoughts?

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[-] Barbarian@sh.itjust.works 7 points 1 year ago

That's basically how it works already. When a user on server A is looking at a community on server B, they're not actually hitting server B. When the first person subscribes to the community, server A started downloading and caching all the content. The user is looking at it locally. Server A will then periodically synchronize with server B.

This means the primary load is on the server containing the users, not the server containing the community.

this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023

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