Otherwise, if we have a lot of medium sized instances but the most popular communities are hosted on just a few huge instances, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of distributing load across many instances?
If that’s the case, how do we solve the cumbersome user experience of having to subscribe to the same community over and over again across a ton of medium instances?
That’s the thing, if instance admins do that to avoid duplicate communities, won’t that just mean that a few huge instances will be the ones with most of the popular communities, and have outsized sway/traffic costs?
Then we’re back to square one and defeat the whole purpose of distributing load across many medium instances. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
You’re not putting traffic on the server that hosts a community when you browse it from another instance. Also, I believe when you post and upload an image it’s hosted on the server you’re browsing on, not the federated one that has the community.
It gets copied to the existing community as well (and every instance it’s federated with).
So the real consideration is that large communities are heavy on storage for any instance with a user that uses it. Ideally there are lots of small communities and instances so nothing gets too much traffic.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification.
I suppose the “best” way would be to distribute the big communities over different instances, like one instance gets “pics”, another gets “memes”, someone else gets “news”, etc. But of course that will never happen.
I’m taking a more free-spirited approach to my instance, communities can be formed as the users please here. The ideal would be lots of medium-sized instances each with a few large communities, but ultimately people will join where they want and we don’t have much control over it.
This is what has already happened to some extend, but communities are free to move away to another instance. Fx !Android!android@lemmy.world moved to !Android!android@lemdro.id.
You could also say that the moderators of communities that exist on multiple instances, have a certain responsibility as well, but it is tricky. Beehaw.org has many of the same communities that the rest of the Lemmyverse has, but they also defederate with the biggest instance lemmy.world.