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.
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
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.
I think I’m going to host my own. I have a bunch of good, short domains I could set it up with.
Should be. One instance hosting lot of community vs one instance hosting one community is less load. But your instance have to be popular enough to make a dent in the popular instances users.
