When a user (say, my mother) gets to a page that says pick a server, she would immediately close the page and go do something else. How do you even begin to choose a server? What if you get it wrong? What should you consider when picking a server?

Its a simple concept that can be explained in a minute. But if you don’t have someone sitting next to you that understands it and can explain it, that user is gone.

Registration applications are an unrelated barrier but a barrier none the less. You don’t have to apply to Facebook and wait to be approved. People expect to just be able to sign up and immediately go.

For anyone familiar with the fediverse both of these things seem like non-issues. But for your average Facebook user. Hell, even your average reddit user, they will take one look at either a page telling them to pick a server or a page telling them they have to apply and wait, and unless they are familiar with the Fediverse already then they will back away slowly (or quickly).

When my instance turned on registration applications, there was a 10x drop in the number of registrations, and I’ve heard similar numbers from others.

Doesn’t that say they default new users to a server owned by them? That’s the same kind of thing as defaulting to Lemmy.world for Lemmy apps.

What I mean is a larger list of trusted instances. Including ones outside the control of one organisation, though I get that this is risky for Mastodon because they don’t want to default people to somewhere that’s going to shut down or have some drama and ruin a hard earned brand.

We probably have more leeway to do it in Lemmy apps since (with the exception of Jerboa) they aren’t developed by “Lemmy”, and Lemmy.world is also not run by “Lemmy”. But for this same reason, " Lemmy" has no control over what these apps default to.

We are fine, but it’s not fixed. I have a second VPS running in Finland, using this queue batcher. The Lemmy.world team kindly set up their server to point to this VPS instead of the actual Lemmy.nz server, then the VPS collects all the events and sends them to the Lemmy.nz server in batches of 100.

It keeps us up to date, but it’s cheating 😆

Last I heard Aussie.zone doesn’t have this setup, but they do have a prefetcher (or rather, Nothing4You, who made the queue batcher, is running a prefetcher for them). This basically takes the new comments and posts from Lemmy.world, and sends a request to Aussie.zone to fetch that post. Because this happens outside the normal federation queue it can be done in parallel. It means when Aussie.zone receives the federated activity from Lemmy.world, it already has it, so it can reply quicker and process more events per second. Lemmy clears out activities older than a week in a weekly scheduled job, which is why you will see Aussie.zone’s backlog drop a bit once a week. They won’t get that content from Lemmy.world, it’s just lost. Because of the prefetcher, it’s likely just up/down votes (which can’t be prefetched).