It looks like a lot of people want to self-host Lemmy. Would having an ActivityPub relay setup for those instances to subscribe to, instead of them all subscribing individually to the bigger instances be feasible? I’ve only seen discussions online about relays in regards to Mastodon. Has anyone attempted to set up one for use with Lemmy instances?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the capabilities of relays. The problem I am thinking about is having too many smaller instances subscribed to communities on each of the larger ones, causing a lot of unnecessary traffic. If there is a way to have all those smaller instances subscribe through one or a few relays, that would keep traffic on the bigger instances down and help spread the load.
Oh, yes, the chattiness of the ActivityPub protocol could very well become a problem and some sort of network topology will need to be designed. Without a fediverse-wide governance structure, that could be difficult!
Well actually if the popular communities weren’t concentrated on the larger instances, and rather spread out it would be less of a problem I think. But, yes at the peak of things I was averaging around 5 hits a second from lemmy.world alone on incoming federation messages.
I think making a separate run relay isn’t the answer. I think perhaps the larger instances running a separate server for federation outgoing messages, and perhaps redirecting incoming federation messages too. So as to separate federation and UI. If they don’t already of course. That could go a long way to making it take longer to overwhelm.
You’re not misunderstanding. They just solve more than one issue, and create a few too.