Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
If the fediverse ever wants to scale, something like this has to come about. I personally think we need a whole lot of regional servers. For example, we make a cluster of servers by country, so lemmy.us, Lemmy.de, etc. Then, when those servers start to fill to a certain threshold (say 1000 users), we break them out regionally, so lemmy.ne.us, lemmy.se.us, etc. The way servers are assigned would be by selecting your country and region. It shouldn’t be too complex and would simplify the sign up people for a lot of people.
We already see lag in comments and posts with the current load. It could be buggy apps as this is relatively new, but who knows. I am no network engineer, but I would imagine that issue to only get worse as user numbers increase.
If you see lag, you should try using a different instance. LW was noticeably slow during summer 2021, a lot of people moved to other instances due to that
As long as the fediverse has a barrier to entry for most people of mandating choosing a server first, it will never become the mainstream choice.
Hey… that just gave me a small idea… what if we made a “flock” or “herd” of Mastodon servers? The group of servers would all federate with each other, have the same block and allow lists, moderation policy and teams spread throughout them.
When you make an account you can be assigned a random instance name within the flock. If your instance goes down you could still possibly log in using other servers? Main benefit would be spreading server costs and maintenance effort and de-centralized operating, but still keep a centralized feel to it?
If the fediverse ever wants to scale, something like this has to come about. I personally think we need a whole lot of regional servers. For example, we make a cluster of servers by country, so lemmy.us, Lemmy.de, etc. Then, when those servers start to fill to a certain threshold (say 1000 users), we break them out regionally, so lemmy.ne.us, lemmy.se.us, etc. The way servers are assigned would be by selecting your country and region. It shouldn’t be too complex and would simplify the sign up people for a lot of people.
You’re assuming that all those servers would have the same policies and admins.
As we can see from their recent announcement, the LW team has some specific policies in their Terms of Service that no other instance replicates.
You are thinking about load balancing, but that can be handled by Cloudflare or something else, it’s doesn’t have to be a different instance.
We already see lag in comments and posts with the current load. It could be buggy apps as this is relatively new, but who knows. I am no network engineer, but I would imagine that issue to only get worse as user numbers increase.
If you see lag, you should try using a different instance. LW was noticeably slow during summer 2021, a lot of people moved to other instances due to that