It seems https://lemmy-federate.com/ is just wildly popular with people suggesting it and eagerly biting on the suggestion they were given. It seems to just completely subvert the intention of not wasting any storage or space or even energy by federating out communities others did not ask for, or federating in communities nobody on the instance subscribes to, by having bots on instances follow communities. So my understanding is that even if nobody on example.instance cares about exampleCommunity@federate.org, example.instance still wastes resources on federating it in if someone submitted it here.

I do see that

If you want to add your instance to the list, you can login from top right. If you are a user, you can ask your instance admin to add your instance.

on this page. And I have heard of instances opting out from this. So I am curious: if your instance does not participate, what does that mean? No bots subscribing to communities on your instance so they go to everyone else? How does it work? I looked at https://lemy.lol/c/lemmyfederate@lemy.lol and https://lemmy-federate.com/ and https://github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-federate and did not see an explanation. On the list of instances on lemmy federate almost everyone seems to be enabled. So I’m curious how it works. Half of me thinks this chips away at the whole point of decentralization, just making sure every instance federates tons of stuff in regardless of actual user interest on the instance. The other half says people can do what they want with their instance, maybe I just do not understand how it works and it does not cause the problems I think it does, even if I’m right maybe most Lemmy users want it, and that it doesn’t actually impact my life unless I decide to start being an instance host myself (and in that case then I would really need to know how it works, to figure out how my own instance would behave with lemmy-federate and what restrictions I could place on it).

Please let me know if my understanding is wrong, and how it actually works if so, because I have actually tried the provided resources by the lemmy-federate project to understand before coming here and sharing my understanding and disapproval of how it works if it works the way I think it does.

  • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksMEnglish
    41·
    10 hours ago

    aggressively pruning old content

    I can understand why instance admins would do this, but I’m personally not a fan of this approach, as it contributes to link rot and makes the fediverse a poor archive for information.

    leaving original copies of images on their home instance, etc… But fundamentally saving on resources is pretty difficult to do if you want redundancy, decentralisation and resilience.

    I wonder if it would be feasible to store a list of which other instances also have a copy of the file, and only make a local copy if the number of “seeders” drops too low. It would cost more in CPU and API usage, but would cut down on storage.