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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I've created my own instance in order to not create more load on others and it took a minute to realise I needed to populate it myself, would be nice to have a default view aggregating popular posts etc. across instances. But maybe I'm just asking for too much hehe

That's an interesting idea. Maybe you could even choose the "default subs" for your instance from across lemmy.

I did the exact same thing. Ended up looking up the more popular communities on the bigger instances and searched for them on mine to index them.

I wish there was an easier way, but for now there isn't.