Basically, I have read several statements addressing this topic. For example:
“If my server gets too big I will just close registrations”
“Server X got too big, so they closed registrations to manage the load”
While I do understand that this can help for small servers which don’t have a big number of external users. How does this help with big and popular servers? Don’t they have to serve requests from external users using their resources? For example, I might self host a server just for my account but I read all my content from lemmy.world. Am I not using their bandwidth and their resources anyway?
Bonus question: Does federating with other servers increase the resource usage of my server? What kind of metadata/data do I have to store from each server I federate with?
Thanks!
How I understand it is that database/io calls are heavy and network calls are relatively light. A user on the instance itself equals Database/io and a federated server means just 1 database call and a bunch of network calls. Since it’s a push model the instance only has to retrieve the data from the database itself once and then just pushes it to all subscribed instances.