Is it time for lemmy.world to work with other hosters to have "sister" instances?
Is it time for lemmy.world to work with other hosters to have "sister" instances?
Lemmy.World is rapidly growing, maybe it’s time for some holsters to group together and distribute Thay load to other instances.
Maybe custom ui logic could be made for the sign up page that auto signs you up for an instance that is an official sister instance to the main lemmy.world. it could tell the user why ( to reduce load on a single server) and have a choice for the user to opt out.
Just a thought. I mean I made a new account because I was having trouble posting on my .world account, and I can't even login to jerboa still.
IMO I think in order to fully utilize part what makes the fediverse great, this should be supported natively. Thoughts? I’d love to hear from the admins and community mods.
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Users aren't going to care about server load. The only problem the users will care about is "Does this work right now the instant I want it to."
Having an entire separate service/microservice that load balances instances wouldbe very complicated to implement for what is largely no reason. If an instance is at capacity, close registration or switch it to invite only and direct people to a different instance.
There's also the option of doing something like the mastodon signup portal that just gives you a list of servers and a blurb about what they're about.
Making a series of different instances that are intrinsically tied together and controlled by the same mod team already has a name: A centralized network.
Already exists: join-lemmy.org
Never said the same mod team, just a trusted sister instance, like the only way they'd be link is by a signup page. To lighten the load of what users are access what instances. It's not centralized, it's a decentralized partnership.
But yes making an instance invite only and redirecting to other instances would also work.
But I'm essentially talking about something very similar to the mastadon signup, just instead of leaving it up to the user initially, it picks on and the user can change their mind if they want.
The whole point is the user probably won't care. They'll see the messages "In order to help with server load, we've set this sign-io for lemmy.alt.world(as a theoretical example), you will still have access to all the same content. If that's not ok [click here] to choose your instance manually."
And then most uses would just be like "ok sure sounds good"
Right, they won't care until they find out the instances moderation policy doesn't fit for them and then they're stuck with all their content on an instance they don't want to be on anymore
I feel like the separate mods would have to come to an agreement on rules of course.
But I mean, that's an unlikely situation. Even if it were to happen, I don't think it's unreasonable to say they could essentially migrate their account to another instance.
Migration isn't possible right now but probably will be in the future.
This same thing was attempted on Mastodon and did not go well. I'm not sure if the coalition still exists but it caused a lot of community gracturing
Ah I see.
Well I think it's not unreasonable to think that there needs to be a way for an instance's traffic to be distributed across several servers without solely the admin having to go the traditional CDN route.
Perhaps people could help by hosting encrypted data stores that could connect to the central instance. They don't have access to modify or read the data plaintext, but just like a cdn their hosted instances could serve data to clients.