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this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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Fediverse
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Wouldn’t it all just come crumbling down if every user spun up a server?
Why is that?
As I understand it, fediverse has a lot of syncing overhead (it takes a lot of bandwidth and processing to share content between all the servers). The more servers there are, the more overhead is used for syncing.
While lots of servers is good for resilience, and diversification of communities, going to the extent of every individual hosting a server seems like an overburdensome extreme.
not that it would ever happen at critical mass, but i think there’s a valid criticism here.
when i first heard about federated platforms my initial impression was that it was more of a “hub and spoke” system than the free-for-all it currently is. i still think there’s some merit to having a few larger “parent” instances that handle the federation between each other, while individual instances pull federation via their “parent” instance. seems like this approach would help reduce some of that overhead, but that does jeopardize the open nature of the protocol.
it’s a tough thing to balance.