Do you believe Lemmy/Mastodon can become mainstream and fully replace their centralized counterparts?
What the title says. I think there is still a long way for that to happen but i've been hopeful. What do you think?
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My only hesitation is, how does it scale? There might be a good answer, but I can't seem to find it. If a specific page gets excessive popularity like /r/memes, is the entire burden of hosting that left to one instance? And can that load be shared somehow, either by adding more physical servers or getting help from other instances?
That is a (good) question every venture ask. Eventually everything scales, and I have a feeling that it won't be an issue.
While you're probably right, I would like to know how it's going to be handled on a technical level. I would imagine the protocol has to already have support for something along those lines, but I'm too lazy to go look and understand for myself. Maybe in a week or two if I don't know it I'll start looking at the sauce code
Nope, ActivityPub (the protocol) doesn't support communities to be distributed over multiple instances.
Instances can horizontally scale to multiple servers, just like massive websites like reddit do. If you host a huge community, you can gather enough donations to pay for the hosting of your scaled instance.
I can imagine that a future version of ActivityPub will support something like grouping communities of different instances, which could also allow scaling, but will be a bit awkward given you'd then have a community run on multiple instances, so with potentially different rules and the possibility of communities splitting when the instances decide not to group or federate anymore.
The hope is that it scales upwards!
Or eventually, it scales the other way when someone else who can scale better than you comes along, at least in the world of social.
Not sure if it's possible, but I wonder if there is some ability to sync instances... so maybe 2 instances, for example can host it at once, effectively clustering it and sharing the bandwidth/processing load?