I was thinking about this in regards to all the “defederation” posts.
Let’s say you spin up a server and over night it gets super popular and grows enormous. Now your yearly expenses shoot up and you’re forced to either look for a new host or shut down.
Now what if instead, you could get a few other people to spin up more small instances and distribute parts of your biggest communities to them, however the users don’t notice because The communities are looking across instances instead of within their home instance?
That’s the idea at least. This would allow for many things but most importantly, it would make things a bit more manageable. Thoughts?
I do know that if you attempted this right now, all of the instances would need to access the same database somewhere which would retain a bottleneck.
Switching to a different distributed (eventually-consistent) database may be possible for Lemmy as a software but perhaps not possible (or difficult) for ActivityPub. I don’t know that.
I think the requests could just be routed for each “distributed community”, but yeah, for the user data, a single database will have to be used, which is… not very secure to say the least.