Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.
I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?
Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?
Thanks. Based on some of the other answers, particularly in https://sh.itjust.works/comment/12511, I know understand better.
I appreciate everyone helping to explain some pretty basic questions in such detail.
We're all learning. And I want to stress -- and maybe should have in my original reply -- that I wasn't really trying to criticize. My reply was just going to be so far down, I figured it'd only be noticed by a handful of people.
The way you intuited things is the way a lot of people have intuited things on the Fediverse. There were big blow-ups on Mastodon about this 6 months ago, as users spoke out about instance admins defederating from other Mastodon instances who hosted accounts that chronically broke local rules.
It became clear that people interpreted these defederations as denying new local users' access to "parts of Mastodon", as if there were was some central object called "Mastodon" and local admins were being nannies about letting some of their users wander over to some parts of it, when in reality it was a case of the local admins refusing to host content from other websites that gave shelter to individuals who were abusive or otherwise breaking rules that existed on the local site.
If that makes sense.
If you can grok that we're basically all on different, independent web forums, and there's just an implicit agreement between the forums to cross-post and share content, you can better grok why somethings that will happen here happen.
I’m old enough to have participated in Usenet before web servers existed, with the idea that different Usenet servers carried different feeds. Now that I better understand it, that model is closer than my original understanding. I also realize it’s not a completely accurate model, since there’s no central hierarchy to the fediverse like Usenet had, but at least it works to get me to understand the idea that all interactions are going through the server I’m pointed at and that posts originating from other servers across the fediverse are being replicated to my server so I can interact.
Noice. It's really nice seeing the Reddit migration bring people to the fediverse who experienced the Internet prior to, like, 2012, rather than shunned it, like the Twitter migration brought.
The type of user that is alienated enough by the API changes and capable of actually creating a Lemmy account surely has significant overlap with internet veterans and generally intelligent people. Which is fantastic news, I remember trying voat.co and it was just overrun by nazis and complete idiots. So far on Lemmy my experience has been the opposite. I'm not old enough to be a Usenet veteran, but I did experience the age of the BBS. I remember spending a lot of time on Totse back in the day.
That's true. The Twitter exodus was triggered by people hating a guy, and it's easy for me, in the excitement of watching this space grow, to forget that this is a different situation.
Oh, I didn’t take your comment as critical. I was asking because there’s lots I don’t understand. You clarified a basic misunderstanding I had. I appreciate it.