Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
Does anyone have any idea what specs are required to run alemmy server, how about the “big” ones at the moment, just to get an idea of the scale of the challenge?
Here is a post from the admin of sh.itjust.works talking about his setup that is currently handling 2k+ users pretty well, and according to the latest update 10 minutes ago still has a lot more spare capacity to go.
I’ve seen some posts about self-hosted Lemmy servers that run very well on the cheapest VPS tiers that hosting services can provide (the 2-5 USD/month range).