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 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. Is there any “balancers” to utilise these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with a such fast growth?
The problem is that in order to understand how the system works you have to use it first. Now if you are one of the people running away from Reddit, it’s natural to try to find the most popular server that provides most content to scroll through because that’s how it it used to work.
It also doesn’t help that join-lemmy.org highlights active users per month as a metric even though in the end it shouldn’t matter at all.
Absolutely. Having grown up with MMOs in the early 2000s I honestly thought I needed to pick the biggest most active instance akin to chosing an active game server 😅