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 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. Is there any “balancers” to utilise these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with a such fast growth?
Yup. I signed up for Lemmy.ml before I realized that. I think it’d be really helpful if the instances set a cap on number of users, so theat when you went to join-Lemmy.org and saw that beehaw has 1.9k users OUT OF 2k, then it’d be more likely to sign up for a different instance.
I’ve seen a lot of people (including myself) who were immediately pointed at lemmy.ml only to realize that wasn’t the best place to be. I think one thing that would help smooth the transition is to have a tool for migrating your account to a different instance. As it stands now, I had to create a new account, go through and manually transfer the communities I had already built up, and then learn what it takes to get the rest of my list recognized on the new instance.