There is perennial discussion about what fediverse servers (Lemmy or otherwise) to recommend to new users. I have a proposal, perhaps not very original but I haven’t seen it made often.
Let’s just recommend that newbies pick an instance that is located close to them geographically. That’s to say: their country, their region, or (ideally) their town.
Some context. Personally, I am not totally sold on social media, federated or otherwise. The evidence is now pretty clear that it causes major social harms. One way it does this is by fuelling polarization around hot-button national and international debates, at the expense of local issues. Reviving democracy is going to mean boosting communities at a local level. This could be a small way to do that.
I’m sorry, this is not how federation works, and if it were truly as limited as “one activity at a time”, moving a community to an entirely different continent is a fantastically short sighted idea.
Moving geographically closer to something else is important if you need real-time savings (e.g. high frequency trading, scientific research). ActivityPub is an asynchronous communications protocol built upon technology with decent if occasionally dubious reliability. Doing something this drastic to shave off ~100ms is not correct.
Afaik it is a specific implementation issue in Lemmy that causes this. Instances in Australia had problems catching up with lemmy.world because of that.
It wasn’t just a problem. It was literally impossible for them to keep up.
Re-locating the server was the only option, as opposed to skipping events or shutting down until the problem was fixed.
Please do not condescend.
I know it doesn’t have to work that way, but for a time, it did.
Here is one of the github issues on the problem.
And yes. It led to instance relocations.
It was either don’t federate, and wait for an update with unknown eta, or move closer to the big instances.