Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it’s from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe it would have to do so with local data.

To illustrate with some possibly-new-to-you examples:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

What’s your experience like clicking these? Does it go through first time?
I realize they’ll be people for whom these work first time no problem, and they’ll wonder what I’m complaining about. I’m not really complaining about anything really, I’m just wondering if my instinctive reaction has any validity.

  • @[email protected]
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    3211 months ago

    I’m on lemmyworld and all worked fine for me.

    Also, some were great, so I subscribed. Thanks for sharing!

    • freamonOP
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      1511 months ago

      Also, some were great, so I subscribed. Thanks for sharing!

      That wasn’t my primary intention, but they were all taken from [email protected] if you’re looking for more.

        • Coelacanth
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          411 months ago

          The trending communities link is fantastic and to be honest a community I wish was a default subscription for new accounts. There is no official algorithm for “trending communities” in the Lemmy software as far as I know and the field called that in the browser is actually just “newly created communities”.

  • RickRussell_CA
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    1811 months ago

    My main concern is the long-term cost of compute and storage. These instances aren’t going to be free, and hopefully we can build a funding model that works.

    • @[email protected]
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      911 months ago

      Especially since, and correct me if I am wrong, but every instance holds all of the data for all of the other instances too? (that they are federated with).

      This means there is an insane amount of redundancy no? With hundreds or thousands of servers the cost would eventually become prohibitive and need to rely on only a select few large servers and thus Lemmy doesn’t ‘solve’ the issue it tries to in that sense.

      Or, maybe it’s only the bandwidth that becomes an issue and the data storage is actually minimal. If that’s the case I can see more how a smaller server could afford to be part of the ecosystem. Perhaps also down the line if not already there could be a cut off point for historical data to avoid bloat.

      • freamonOP
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        1811 months ago

        Especially since, and correct me if I am wrong, but every instance holds all of the data for all of the other instances too? (that they are federated with).

        Just the text I think. It’s not nothing, but if you upload an image to your instance as part of a post, the text is copied to my instance, but with just a link to the image, so it could be worse.

          • @[email protected]
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            311 months ago

            Wikipedia isn’t a social platform. I suspect that their text growth was log(n) or something of the like. The only new text are things that are literally new or updates.

            Lemmy has no cap there. The amount of new text will grow in some proportion to the user base. The more users and more instances, the more text. To say nothing of duplication from cross posting when you get wonky cuts in the federation connections.

            None of this is free and it’s going to be a problem if Lemmy grows.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          Ahhh, ok that makes far more sense actually then. Text alone isn’t too bad especially if there are some optimisations available along the way.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          And even then, the text data could eventually be stored in a content-addressed store (like IPFS or torrent files). This would mean that each instance could keep only its own data and let the redundant part in some cache.

      • PupBiru
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        311 months ago

        not all the data afaik, but all the data for subs that it’s users are subscribed to

  • @[email protected]
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    1411 months ago

    I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

    1. were empty, and
    2. had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

    Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

    • kglitch
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      1711 months ago

      You got it.

      This is a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol so similar kinds of behaviour / problems shows up in mastodon, etc as well. Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 months ago

        Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

        So does this mean that if I’m browsing “All” I’m not actually seeing “All” but “All from the communities/instances members of my instance subscribe to”?

          • @[email protected]
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            311 months ago

            That explains a lot, then. When I was on Vlemmy before it was deleted “All” seemed a lot more populated, now I moved to a smaller instance and it seems a lot more repetitive.

            It’s a shame it works that way since everyone says the “ideal” is a ton of small instances rather than big ones.

            Thanks for the clarification!

            • kglitch
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              211 months ago

              Yup. You need to use a third party service like https://lemmyverse.net/communities and then subscribe.

              There’s no reason why this functionality can’t be built into lemmy/kbin in future. It’s on the feature wishlist for the lemmy/kbin clone that I’m building.

  • SolidGrue
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    1311 months ago

    Neither more nor less optimistic than the pre-Facebook days of Usenet/Alternet, and E-mail.

    Federation works, if you can keep it.

    • freamonOP
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      511 months ago

      I sent emails pre-Facebook. If anything, they were more reliable then than they are now.

  • pitninja
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    811 months ago

    What you’ve described is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Once a user has subscribed to an external community from your instance, it should load immediately for any users afterwards.

    • freamonOP
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      711 months ago

      I realize this. How well it works for User 2 isn’t super-relevant for User 1’s experience. And if you’re from a small instance, you’ll always be User 1. To me, it seems like the answer to if the page will successfully load for User 1 is ‘maybe’, and I guess I was questioning whether this is good enough.

      • pitninja
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        11 months ago

        I see, well I guess the real question is whether it can be improved at the server/protocol level and my answer is I don’t know. There’s some handshaking that clearly has to occur between your instance and the other instance to load the initial community state and I don’t know where that process can be optimized. I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy.

        Edit, and there’s never going to be a guarantee that your server can talk to their server until you try clicking the link because the other server could be overloaded, down, or blocking your server.

        • freamonOP
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          411 months ago

          I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy

          They have a bot at lemmings.world that subs to the most popular communities. It’s mostly to benefit their ‘All’ feed I think, but I imagine it’s good for this circumstance too.

      • 6daemonbag
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        11 months ago

        On a smaller instance, the first link didn’t work for me :(

        Nevermind, sync didn’t recognize the rest of the url

  • @[email protected]
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    411 months ago

    They all loaded for me, but cyberpunk had a loading icon for 20 seconds (I guess while it was getting that information from the server).

  • sj_zero
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    211 months ago

    It fails to easily open from an instance that has never seen those communities before. You have to connect to them using the search then it pulls the post history (but not the comment history)

    • freamonOP
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      611 months ago

      Do I seem entitled? That wasn’t my intention. I even made a point of saying I wasn’t complaining. I just have one eyebrow raised, and was wondering if I should pop it back down again.