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.
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.