Comment on How to set up a decentralized game/chat server
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 day agoActually I can provide a little more detail. Check out how Matrix handles event graph resolution/desync. It’s why messages sometimes come in out of order. This is a fundamental problem with decentralization: authority breakdown. The homesever in Matrix is considered the authority for the clients, but within the Federation itself there is no true authoritative party or event history. If a server goes off federation for a while, a room will split, and once it re-federates it and other servers will have different event graphs, assuming something happened in those rooms in the meantime for both the defederated server and federated server(s).
Basically: videogames assume that within a certain amount of latency the server’s state is permanent and authoritative. Federation breakdowns even for 500ms can destroy a games running state.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Thank you for the detailed explanation
It sounds like my friends and I are better off just having 1 primary server running everything, and pushing backups to 1 or 2 other servers that can be spun up if/when things go wrong with the primary server.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 19 hours ago
Yeah probably.
Even big Minecraft servers are just many servers with load ballancers. The game has server redirects built in for this reason.