this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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This is one thing I'm a bit confused on. All the communities you are subscribed to are accessed via your home instance. Therefore doesn't your home instance also effectively serve all of the fediverse on its own? I see the benefit of migrating users, but what would be the point of migrating communities? Seems like communities are effectively just tags.
Surely both the webapp and Jerboa could be written to be able to partially pull content from other servers for scalability. Maybe that's already the case now? But in my experience so far, I am either browsing global content pulled directly from my local instance or the app just wholly redirects me to a different instance where I have no account and can't really participate. This is especially jarring in Jerboa, which kicks me out of the app entirely.
I agree, it is a bit confusing - and as you’ve seen, isn’t quite optimal yet.
My concern with having an ability to migrate entire communities, is that the hosting instance takes the brunt of the load of the community. I’m envisioning a scenario where, let’s say Lemmy.ml is hosting a number of large community, and one community explodes - say, “funny.” Say it gets absolutely massive. Lemmy.ml is running out of capacity and either has to grow vertically, which is a cost to the owner, or it can migrate a community (or cluster of communities) to another instance that has the capacity to host it - this distributes the load.
Ideally, this will not be an issue for many years. Maybe the backend can be written as a sort of “raid5” across cooperating instances, both for load distribution/balancing and for high-availability. Who knows, I’m not a dev, and I have no doubt it would be a massive undertaking. But it’s not difficult to foresee problems down the road as the fediverse grows - especially if/when there’s a massive Reddit migration. 🤷♂️