“You can access all content from the Lemmyverse from any server, so it doesn’t matter which you choose” 1. not strictly true and 2. if it doesn’t matter why make the choice?
This is a great point. If it doesn’t matter, why not randomly assign you to an instance? The reality is that it does because some instances are political, and some federate with other instances that could give a negative impression of Lemmy. By people recommending particular instances to sign up to, shows that there’s an element of calculation as to which instance to pick.
Onto your second point, your impact would be negligible. I wouldn’t worry about that scenario.
Die4Ever@programming.dev 1 week ago
Likely no. If one person on the instance is subscribed to a remote community, everything is synchronized anyways. If no one is subscribed to the remote community then it’s probably a very small and low activity community anyways, which means it’s a drop in the bucket difference.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
So is a large part of lemmy.world cached on sh.itjust.works’ server? Does Pixelfed, Loops or Peertube work the same way? I could see images or video being more of a burden to serve like that. Or does AP sync the metadata like thumbnail, video title, description, comments etc. and the video itself is torrented straight from the host server?
meldrik@lemmy.wtf 1 week ago
Pretty much, yes. Images is cached. Video is not. However PeerTube supports P2P.