This is the primary reason why I’m ok for my instance to not grow massively. We got 10K people and we have pretty good traffic ,without overloading us or making too much of a target. We still get new users since we allow registrations, but the application requirements retain the quality
a single instance can get knocked out without talking out the whole fediverse
Honestly, it may as well have in this case. LemmyWorld is the de facto “hub” for basically the entire Threadiverse right now. All the major communities are seeing the most activity through LemmyWorld. While I’m subscribed to a lot of communities from other instances, sometimes duplicates of ones found on LemmyWorld, losing LemmyWorld would still a huge chunk of the content that I’m trying to see.
I really do wish that more specialized instances would sprout up and that some of these communities could cluster together across multiple pockets of the Threadiverse. I feel like this makes it less likely to lose huge chunks of content, and also makes fewer large targets for somebody to want to attack in the first place.
You don’t need to necessarily centralize to defend against DDos or similar attacks. You can add things like Cloudflare for DDos mitigations, CDN and maybe something like Kubernetes for horizontal scaling of servers (spin up more servers to handle extended load) transparently behind the scenes. This can also get you the benefits of low geographical latency, so a load-balancer fetches you data from the closest replica of a database geographically, etc.
Of course, all this adds up in terms of cost, but I think this might be worth it for the largest instances. I suppose that can still be considered centralization.
If we wanted to encourage small many small instances instead, perhaps there could be a transparent load-balancer layer for the fediverse that instances could sign up for, that is managed by a devops group. Alternatively, lemmy could have built-in load-balancing, caching, etc. as part of its codebase that instance operators can set up with their own accounts at Cloudflare, etc.
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This is the primary reason why I’m ok for my instance to not grow massively. We got 10K people and we have pretty good traffic ,without overloading us or making too much of a target. We still get new users since we allow registrations, but the application requirements retain the quality
Honestly, it may as well have in this case. LemmyWorld is the de facto “hub” for basically the entire Threadiverse right now. All the major communities are seeing the most activity through LemmyWorld. While I’m subscribed to a lot of communities from other instances, sometimes duplicates of ones found on LemmyWorld, losing LemmyWorld would still a huge chunk of the content that I’m trying to see.
I really do wish that more specialized instances would sprout up and that some of these communities could cluster together across multiple pockets of the Threadiverse. I feel like this makes it less likely to lose huge chunks of content, and also makes fewer large targets for somebody to want to attack in the first place.
You don’t need to necessarily centralize to defend against DDos or similar attacks. You can add things like Cloudflare for DDos mitigations, CDN and maybe something like Kubernetes for horizontal scaling of servers (spin up more servers to handle extended load) transparently behind the scenes. This can also get you the benefits of low geographical latency, so a load-balancer fetches you data from the closest replica of a database geographically, etc.
Of course, all this adds up in terms of cost, but I think this might be worth it for the largest instances. I suppose that can still be considered centralization.
If we wanted to encourage small many small instances instead, perhaps there could be a transparent load-balancer layer for the fediverse that instances could sign up for, that is managed by a devops group. Alternatively, lemmy could have built-in load-balancing, caching, etc. as part of its codebase that instance operators can set up with their own accounts at Cloudflare, etc.