I ask generally out of curiosity. I was just thinking that as big social media fractures, old school isolated forums might become “cool again”, and that one of the achievements of lemmy might be as a nice platform for simply running a forum for whatever community you want all without needing to worry about federation.
If it turns out that work of federating data is a substantial part of the resource overhead, and that an isolated server would actually be quite efficient, that’d be quite a nice feather in the lemmy cap I’d say. Hexbear seems to have been using lemmy this way for a while and it seems to have been successful too.
Not sure about resource usage but a single instance for a given community mean a single point of failure.
Even with federation the community is bound to an instance, so once the instance goes down the community is down too, at least the federation of the community as far as I understand. So it is already a single point of failure.
Ah, interesting. I did not know that, but it makes sense.
Why is that? That shouldn’t be necessary, should it?
Sure. I’m talking about any group of people that want a forum on the internet without bothering about being on the fediverse. Would just spinning up an unfederated lemmy server be a good option for this from a resources/efficiency standpoint?
Yes it would. Another one written in elixir and no federation stuff in is https://github.com/ckruse/cforum_ex