Like does content get mirrored to my instance and then mine distributes it ala BitTorrent or is my instance it’s own thing?
I run my own instance because the content on it will always be very snappy, since it mirrors the text content that I’m subscribed to. It’s distributed like email or RSS are, in that you choose to subscribe to something, and then it is federated onto your instance when new activity occurs.
Broadly, yes. The way federation works means anything any user on your instance is interested in will be sent to you once (at least posts/comments/votes/etc). Whenever someone on your instance views that thing that is a request that would otherwise be made to another instance. This does, however, increase the load of federation on servers hosting popular communities, as now they have to send each post/comment/vote/whatever to your instance. Unlike bit torrent there is only one place responsible for sending you all of the content that exists in a community, so the fediverse doesn’t get p2p-style network effects where every peer/sever helps even a bit.
A single user instance is a little inefficient, unless you are actually looking at most/all of the content your instance receives, in which case it is probably a wash. The ideal for how federation is implemented in ActivityPub would be many similarly-sized (in terms of user count) instances with the most popular communities being spread out among them.
Sadly right now the most popular instances (lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, lemmynsfw.com, kbin.social) are both where users and communities are, so the real gains to help those instances (several of which continue to struggle under the load) are really only medium and larger sized instances.
These posts are really useful to get a grasp of ActivityPub (if you have a programming background): https://rknight.me/building-an-activitypub-server/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/how-to-implement-a-basic-activitypub-server/
And of course the official spec (although its less useful): https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
Isn’t a semi-significant amount of the per instance load in the database interactions though? I don’t know if that’s still true after some of the optimizations in 0.18, but by having your own instance, even 1 person instance, you no longer load the database of another instance with calculating hot/active/whatever for things you want to see, and you don’t load it when you do pulls.
There is certainly an inflection point. I am not sure where it falls. If you rarely use Lemmy the other servers are expending effort federating to you for no reason, so for a heavy single user it is probably a positive. I imagine it also varies based on how you browse as “new” is probably “lighter” than “hot” or “active”.
Sure, but the server calculates the hot/active every 15 minutes regardless of whether or not you browse it. It’s calculated on a timed job so it’s always fresh and ready for everyone.
Your instance is it’s own thing and will only push data that’s from communities created on your instance to others.
However, since your instance will have limited users, it will consume fewer resources and your browsing experience would be faster.
I’m not sure of where the limits are on the pushing side of things. If people from a lot of instances are subscribed to a particular community in an instance, there is a lot of outgoing data from there. This is something I’m curious about.
Text gets mirrored but not images. In general it helps, but not by much unless you host for several hundred users.
Link thumbnails do get mirrored. My understanding is the front end of Lemmy is pretty heavy for the big instances and the burden of federating to another instance is pretty small. One thing I’ve noticed on my instance is that sometimes inbound federation can be pretty annoyingly slow.
Not only annoyingly slow, but I tend to get a massive influx of posts from one community all at once. It fills my entire page with that single community. It’s been my biggest annoyance so far.
This is fixed in 0.18.x
I’m running 0.18.1-rc.4 and it’s fixed lots of issues
In effect, not really.
All the communities you’re subscribed to will now also have to push all their updates (posts, comments, upvotes) to your server, even when you’re not interacting with Lemmy.
As someone else mentioned, it would only be efficient once you have a decent (hard to pinpoint) amount of users on your server.
They’ll do it once, though. Then every time you view it, you’re helping the bigger servers by serving it from your instance.
Yes. Once for every post, comment and vote.
So say you have your own personal instance, and you use that to follow community news on lemmy.world. If throughout the day that community receives 10 new topics, 50 comments and 100 upvotes, it would have to make 160 calls to your server.
So when you decide to read those 10 topics (if you even read all of them), you would then make roughly 10 api calls.
You would be saving those last mentioned 10 calls by using your own instance, but at the cost of 160 calls made throughout the day.
So you need just 15 more users on your instance to break even, if you have 17 in total, you’ve saved 10 calls.
The thing is that when you interact with the remote server directly it’s not 10 api calls, it’s 10 full-blown HTML webpages that have to be served to you, which are way bigger than REST API calls.
