• Dogeek@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    My main gripe with ActivityPub is that the infrastructure basically replicates 1-to-1 across subscribed instances. It means that as lemmy grows, servers will require more and more storage to keep up. For now, it’s fine since we’re under a few TB of content on the platform.

    If lemmy were to be as popular as reddit, we’d reach the dozens if not hundreds of TB of storage required. Not everyone has the money to build such a homelab or rent data center servers of that caliber.

    ActivityPub in it’s current state is nothing but replicated centralization, not a full decentralized protocol. We’d probably need a different database system that handles cross region clustering and sharing to scale it up.

    • Baŝto
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      3 months ago

      If you don’t mirror everything locally, you can lose data when other instances go down. Decentralization just has high data costs, take a look at git or bitcoin. I just hope ActivityPup learned something from Diaspora, where small instances couldn’t handle the amount traffic comming from big instances.

      • Dogeek@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        My point was that there is no need to replicate everything everywhere. If the data is replicated a cross 5 instances per region for instance, it’s enough for replication needs. If you self host lemmy and subscribes to large communities on your instance, you can quickly overload your server. We need activity pub to be more lightweight if we want smaller instances to thrive.