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?
Sounds like you would prefer a peer2peer approach instead of federation? A few years ago, I wrote up why I don’t belief in p2p. In short: It’s too costly and too complex.
I think a amall hit of p2p can be useful. Maybe as an addition layer. I worked a lot with tendermint nodes (cryptocurrency) and i saw pretty effective solutions.
If you worked with crypto, I think you would understand that ALL crypto is federated, not P2P. You need full nodes to communicate with in order to validate transactions. This is fundamentally federation, anyone can spin up their own full node and participate however they want.
Same is happening here with ActivityPub instead of block chain transactions.