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?
That’s not really how I’d frame things.
Small instances are great due to low overhead. In theory, you don’t really even need to host a single community; you can subscribe to a bunch of remote communities across different servers and frequent those discussions from your own cozy corner.
Like, yeah, centralizing on big instances and not spreading out is bad, but the beauty of federation is that it works well enough these days that your choice of home server is kind of irrelevant. Now, I reckon that this is more challenging when it comes to growing communities on your own small Lemmy instances, but it’s also a matter of announcing said community to where the people are.