[Answer to yesterday's question] The number of active users on join-lemmy.org is now back to normal
[Answer to yesterday's question] The number of active users on join-lemmy.org is now back to normal
https://join-lemmy.org/instances
For mods: I hope it's okay, if not feel free to remove it, but as a lot of people were commenting on the other thread while the reason of the change had been given in the top comment, I thought it was worth it to make a dedicated post.
You're viewing a single thread.
So lemmy.world is still excluded from the list but the active users from it are counted in?
lemmy.world is so big that it breaks federation to geographically distant lemmy instances. Driving more users to it wouldn't help anyone and defeats the purpose of decentralisation.
How does geographic location impact federation?
So, in its current form, lemmy sends federation packets in serial form. It can send them to multiple instances in parallel, but the feed between any two given instances is serial.
And serial means that the second packet doesn't get sent until the first packet has been processed. Add in geographic latency, which is relevant at multiple steps of resolving any given AP packet, which adds to the per packet processing time, and now, lemmy.world is producing packets faster than it's possible for a geographically remote instance to process them, no matter what hardware they're running on.
The problem would be resolved with parallel sending, but that's not currently a thing that lemmy allows for, and apparently, is not trivial to implement either.
I still feel bad for aussie.zone and their 1-week delay with LW
Yes, essentially.