this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology? (feddit.org)
submitted 3 days ago by buedi@feddit.org to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hi there,

I went through the documentation of GoToSocial and there are some pieces of information which confuse me. For example on the Deployment considerations, they state, that once you hosted a particular Fediverse service on your domain, you cannot switch to another technology. Further down in this article in the "Domain name" section it even gives me the impression that if you switch technologies on the same domain, this will in fact cause issues in the whole Fediverse.

Two questions came up when reading through this:

  • Is the ActivityPub protocol and the technologies that depend on it that fragile? Switching technologies on the same Domain would be something I would have just done without a further thought until I find the technology I want to use for years (and which I might still switch out to another one many years in the future).
  • It is not clear from the documentation if you can get around this by hosting the service I want to try under service1.example.com instead of example.com. The documentation states, that you can host your users under user@service1.example.com, but the API services still under example.com. This will not solve the root issue, right?

Getting a new domain for each Activitypub service I might try to implement and test / use does not really sound great to me. Maybe I just did not understand all of that properly and there is no issue?

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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Technically it wasn't really designed with megainstances in mind that swallows the entire fediverse.

My instance has no problem whatsoever keeping up and storage is well under control. But we're few here subscribed to a subset of available communities so my instance isn't 90% filled with content I don't care about and will never look at. Also reduces the moderation burden because it's slow enough I can actually mostly see everything that comes through.

Lemmy itself is also pretty inefficient in that regard, you can very much make software that pulls instead and backfill local cache as needed.

Even my Reddit subscriptions would be pretty easy on my instance.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

You need really small instances for that to do something. The issue here is not only mega instances, but more curcially mega communities.

If people on your instance subscribe to the top 50 communities you already have more than 50% of the whole lemmy traffic on your instance. And 50 subscriptions isn't all that much for even a single user.

And mega communities is kinda the whole point of any reddit-like service. The really cool thing about reddit is that no matter how obscure the topic, there's a subreddit for it with experts in the field. Lemmy is still lacking that for most topics, but that would be where a real Reddit alternative would want to end up.

If you have a look at reddit, they have over 1000 subreddits with over a million subscribers each. Every single one of these subreddits has around 200x the traffic of all of Lemmy combined. So if Lemmy were to grow to Reddit levels and a single user subscribes to a single community like that, your whole instance is cooked.