https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3245
I posted far more details on the issue then I am putting here-
But, just to bring some math in- with the current full-mesh federation model, assuming 10,000 instances-
That will require nearly 50 million connections.
Each comment. Each vote. Each post, will have to be sent 50 million seperate times.
In the purposed hub-spoke model, We can reduce that by over 99%, so that each post/vote/comment/etc, only has to be sent 10,000 times (plus n*(n-1)/2 times, where n = number of hub servers).
The current full mesh architecture will not scale. I predict, exponential growth will continue to occur.
Let’s work on a solution to this problem together.
The same problem can also be solved with signed messages, like the HTTP Signatures used by Mastodon and most of the other microblogging fedi servers. Signatures allow a message to flow peer-to-peer instead of requiring a direct connection. You would only need a connection when actively interacting with a post on another instance, and its very unlikely that all 10K instances would be interacting with each other. Most likely, the network will consist of smallish groups of loosely-related instances plus a few giant servers that can handle the load of being popular.
That, honestly, wouldn’t be a bad idea either. That should in theory help break up a lot of the load which is currently overly centralized.
The implementation should be a lot easier then my purposed idea as well, and it also has side effects of potentially improving security.