this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].

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Hi! Does anyone have a ressource to explain how Lemmy works in terms of the more complicated stuff, as:

  • If a community is hosted on instance A and a user that’s on instance B creates a post in this community, is the post hosted on A, B? Or are individual comments hosted on the instance of their respective authors?
  • what happens when your account gets deleted? Are all my messages deleted? Does this happen to all instances (it syncs the deletion?)
  • do instances cache posts and comments posted on other instances? If so, RAM or disk?
  • will having too many instances increase the load of all instances? (If they all have to sync?)
  • if I want to check the comments of a post, does my client ask this to my instance of to the instance of the author or to the community's instance?

Questions like this. I guess most will be answered by explaining deeply how ActivityPub works but if anyone has that info, please share :)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

the fact everyone basically have a fully copy of everything does have some considerable privacy implications

And I assume some cost concerns as well as posts start to pile up, especially images and whatnot. But the benefit is that it distributes the read load across instances, since you only need to send new content and serve content for your direct users (people on your instance). It's a tradeoff, and I guess we'll see how that works out over the next few years.