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Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by lucien@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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What would happen if instead of users swarming existing servers when a fediverse service was put in the spotlight, each user spun up their own micro-instance and tried to federate with existing servers?

There's always the odd person who decides to host a personal fediverse service in their homelab for themselves, but would the fediverse work if that was actually the primary mode of interaction? Or would it fail in a similar way to now where the servers which receive the most federation requests need to scale up?

Presumably the failure modes for federation are easier to scale than browser requests since it's an async process.

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[–] rektifier@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What you're describing is no longer federation but full P2P. From a purely technical point of view, it may work, but the biggest problem will be abuse (spam, excessive resource use, illegal content). When a new instance shows up, how do you know if it's a spammer or not? And if an instance is blocked by another instance, whose side should you be on?

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago

I hadn't even thought of the moderating yet.

[–] lucien@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

It wouldnt really be full P2P: I'd expect moderated communities to act as a funnel which everyone interacts with each other through. I wasn't really considering the hypothetical micro instances to be like a normal server, since even when federated its unlikely that they would consume as much federation bandwidth as a large instance. Most people wouldn't run a community, simply because they don't want to moderate it.

Realistically, the abuse problems you mention can already currently happen if someone wants to. It's easier to make an account on an existing server with a fresh email, spam a bit, and get banned than it is to register a new domain ($) and federate before doing the same. I think social networks would have a lot less spam if every time you wanted to send an abusive message, you had to spend $10 to burn a domain name.

Most of the content would still live on larger servers, so you end up moderating in the same place. Not much difference between banning an abusive user on your instance and banning an abusive single-user instance.