cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2357075
It seems that self hosting, for oneself, a federated service, like Lemmy, would only serve to increase the traffic in the network, and not actually serve the purpose of load balancing between servers.
As far as I understand it, the way federation is supposed to work is that the servers cache all the content locally to then serve to the people that are registered to that server. In doing so, the servers only have to transmit a minimal amount of data between themselves which lowers the overhead for small servers – this then means that a small server doesn’t get overwhelmed by a ton of people requesting from it. Now, if, instead, you have everyone self hosting their own server, you go right back to having everyone sending a ton of requests to small servers, thereby overwhelming them. It seems that it’s really only beneficial to the network if you have, say, hundreds of medium sized servers instead of, say, thousands, of very small servers. While there is the resilience factor, the overhead of the network would be rather overwhelming.
Perhaps one possibility of fixing this is to use some form of load balancer like IPFS to distribute the requests more evenly, but I am no where even remotely close to being knowledgeable enough in that to say anything definitively.
I’ve been self-hosting Pleroma (Mastodon) for a while as a technical challenge and because I thought it would help. But truth is finding content was a nightmare, and apart from that it was taking all the resources in my machine, and also was receiving network requests like crazy.
In comparison, for Lemmy I just joined a big instance and the experience has been much much better.
I think finding content is the key component of OP’s question. If you host an instance that has only your own subscriptions, the content will feel light, but the extra load on other instances will be minimal and at their convenience. If you load your instance with popular communities so that your All feed pops up weird and interesting content, then the extra load on other instances will be much larger than your personal browsing.
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