Generally speaking, lemmy is much more cpu bound than it is bound by bandwidth - so the added bytes don’t matter that much. The example above was just for 1 community. Now imagine the user is subscribed to a dozen communities, but doesn’t even browse lemmy that day. That’s probably thousands of api calls made to keep his server on sync, and 0 requests saved.

Like the big instances have literally hundreds of thousands of workers running in order to get all the updates out. If one of those calls fails, it gets put back into the queue for retry.

OP asked if having his server added to the lemmiverse would alleviate the load “Like with torrent”. That is demonstrably not the case - it only adds more workload on the other servers, with a break even point that’s highly variable. Yes, your server will be nice and snappy, but the origin servers have to pay the price - death by a thousand papercuts synchronisation calls.

So you need just 15 more users on your instance to break even, if you have 17 in total, you’ve saved 10 calls.

In this particular example, yes. But only if those 15 people subscribe to the exact same communities. If they don’t, the calculation gets even more complicated.

I’m not sure why exactly you’re opposed to federation when that’s one of the biggest points of fediverse.

Some people seem to be under the impression that setting up their own personal server is relieving the pressure on the network. What I trying to get across is that’s not the case, unless it’s being used by a reasonable amount of people.

I can’t tell you what the sweet spot is - but my guess would be that it’s only going to be at least several dozen, more if their interests (subscriptions) don’t overlap very well.

Super useful info! Thank you for your research.

Yes. Once for every post, comment and vote.

So say you have your own personal instance, and you use that to follow community news on lemmy.world. If throughout the day that community receives 10 new topics, 50 comments and 100 upvotes, it would have to make 160 calls to your server.

So when you decide to read those 10 topics (if you even read all of them), you would then make roughly 10 api calls.

You would be saving those last mentioned 10 calls by using your own instance, but at the cost of 160 calls made throughout the day.

It happens. Remember the original meaning of the word hacker, versus its public perception? You can hang on to the original meaning and have an extra hurdle in communication, or you can accept it and move on by being more specific.

At any rate, I think public/private keys are already being used by Lemmy for authentication on the way you propose.

My bad, I thought you meant the other crypto (as did everyone else, presumably). I know cryptography was first, but I think it’s safe to say that that abbreviation has been irrevocably tainted.

That would be good to know, yes. And unless someone has a definitive answer, it would also be interesting to know how much traffic you’d still be receiving if you kept it off for a week, or a month.

I would think that updating 50.000 Lemmy instances would have a similar performance effect of 50.000 Lemmy users browsing one instance.

Only if the users are browsing All their watched communities 24/7. Otherwise they would only be producing load when they’re interacting with Lemmy.

I’m not sure when or if other servers will stop pushing, but did you unsubscribe from all communities before doing so?

Would be interesting to see if that would stop incoming traffic.

In effect, not really.

All the communities you’re subscribed to will now also have to push all their updates (posts, comments, upvotes) to your server, even when you’re not interacting with Lemmy.

As someone else mentioned, it would only be efficient once you have a decent (hard to pinpoint) amount of users on your server.

No down vote from me, but surely by now you know how people feel about crypto.

At any rate, I don’t think an immutable ledger is desirable for speech (what’s the point of moderation), perhaps more something like torrent would be preferable. And, as someone else mentioned, relay software already exists.

Good to know, thanks!

I can say with full confidence that I have absolutely no idea.

I’ve heard this idea thrown around before, so I take no credit for it: One way to circumvent the issue would be to have actual relay nodes. As in: nodes that don’t hold contents or users themselves, but just “broadcast” incoming messages to several instances, so that the source instances don’t have to. This would of course have its own drawbacks and limitations, but it would alleviate the bottleneck.

I’m sure some kind of solution will be found though. Call me optimistic, but I think the lemmi/binniverse has a bright future ahead of it. I, for one, have burned my reddit bridges.

You definitely could, but it’s not really sustainable.

Worst case scenario: if everybody does this, and there’s 50.000 subscribers on a certain community, then that community will have to update 50.000 other servers whenever one user leaves a single message or vote.

Sure, your own server wouldn’t have a hard time, but it every popular server (with lots of subscribers) would. It would either take a long time for you to receive their updates, or you wouldn’t get them at all.

The best thing you can do, is join a medium size server: it won’t be as overloaded as a big server, and wouldn’t cause as much strain on the fediverse as a personal server.