Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
Yes, you are right. If this instance has members. A server will actively fetch “foreign” content and cache when this instance’s user asks. But aside of top 10 servers, there is no profit of having more until they have a couple of dozens of users. If any server would have been able to “delegate” request handling to less busy servers, it will be a solution for this uneven load.