Impact of Lemmy Federate on instances

I’ve seen many arguments claiming that Lemmy Federate creates a significant load on instances in terms of data storage and networking. I used to believe this wasn’t a very valid concern, as I assumed that communities without followers wouldn’t generate many posts, comments, likes, etc.

Today, I had the chance to test this on my own instance, and here are the results:

• Communities
• • Total count: 33,920
• • Federated by LF: 5,863
• • Percentage: 17.28%
• Posts
• • Total count: 3,217,783
• • Federated by LF: 114,067
• • Percentage: 3.54%
• Comments
• • Total count: 14,222,401
• • Federated by LF: 192,925
• • Percentage: 1.36%

LF = Lemmy Federate. Posts and comments refer to the number of posts and comments in communities federated with Lemmy Federate.

As you can see from the statistics, almost 20% of the communities are federated by Lemmy Federate. Although this seems like a high number, only 3.5% of the posts are created in communities federated by Lemmy Federate. The number of comments is even less than the number of posts.

So to answer, Lemmy Federate creates an average load of around 2-3% in an instance with about 1000 users. You can compare it with its benefits and decide whether to use it or not.

If you want to get stats for your own instance, you can run the SQL script below. Let us know the results please :)