Hey all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, please point me in the right direction if not:
So I only came here because of the exodus from reddit, but I’m pumped to see this community and all this technology people have been making. It’s like a return to the old-school, user-operated internet instead of the big awful silos that have been dominating the landscape since the early 2000s. I’m in.
So quick question, are there plans or projects in the works for distributed hosting (making it easier for the users to take up the load of storing and hosting content so the instance operators aren’t stuck with the hosting costs)?
I ask because I’d like to work on a project to implement this, as I feel it’d be a massive further step forward. I’m not sure though if there’s anything existing I should be trying to get up to speed on or if I should be thinking in terms of starting my own project if I want to be working on it.
Lemmy is Federated. You don’t distribute hosting, you have the federation servers communicate with each other.
The best thing you can do is spin up your own instance and convince your friends to use it. That way big communities like https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy only has to send your server one update for a post for all your users to view, rather than sending that update to 20 browsers themselves.
So your lemmy.mo_ztt.com instance could serve the one copy of it’s content to your dozen or so users which takes load off of the “main” instance.
“Instance operators” as you termed it… could be literally anyone. You can host is on a raspberry pi for a handful of users easily. This would lighten the loads on the major “Instance operators”.
What’s the right term for what I’m calling an “instance operator”? I realize that anyone could be one, I just need some language to use to distinguish the people who are from the people who aren’t.
Oh I wasn’t chastising your choice in words there. I was just using your term to make it clear that I’m talking about the same thing you were. I also am relatively new here. I’m not sure what the proper lingo is. I would presume “Instance admins”, but I can see how that could be vague or also include people who might not be paying for the actual hosting itself.