I first used lemmy on lemmy.world but due to its size I had several issues of things just not loading and needing a full page refresh. So I tried to set up my own instance and it works mostly but the federation aspect is leaving me with a few questions.
Will remote communities only sync new posts from when I subscribed or will past posts show up eventually?
Is having a single user instance realistic or should I try find another small instance?
A lot of us did this, but now the big servers like lemmy.world are having to send every vote, comment, post to a huge number of servers and it results in unreliable delivery due to the servers being overloaded. There are 10 second timeouts in the HTTP connection between servers and the retry attempts are limited (and in their desperation to keep the severs from being even slower they are reducing retries).
The federation protocols have too much overhead, I don’t see how this will work. I’ve been suggesting that Lemmy to Lemmy replication of comment/post/votes not even use federation and bulk download via polling the front-end API and even some new API calls intended for server to server message sync. An entirely new system.
You would be helping the Lemmy overload problems of servers like lemmy.world to not run your own instance and get on another small one that’s already getting most of the content already.