Are all these thousands of lemmy servers useless?

Averrin@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 15 points –

Correct me if I'm wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I'm a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any "balancers" to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?

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r/trees comes to mind, if there was an actual arborist community that want r/trees, well they were fucked.

There was. They ended up with, I think, /r/marijuana_enthusiasts or something like that. It was quite funny to both sides, at least it was like 15 years ago.

As a former marijuanaenthusiast subscriber it was funny for about 5 minutes and then annoying for the next 10 years. I am considering making a similar community here but /c/trees has already been claimed by the other community. So I have to decide if I want to deal with the confusion or name it something else.

Yeah I can see that.

Maybe name it /c/arborists? 🤷‍♂️

Shame that that baggage would have to carry over, but the flip side is can you imagine the confusion if it didn’t.