Sorry if I say something wrong, I’m not that experienced in this area.
So, when you connect to google.com, you’re not connecting to one IP regardless of location. Your request is routed to the closest google server’s ip address (using anycast? Yes, I just googled this lol).
I’m guessing the Lemmy servers don’t do this yet? So, would it be best to sign up to a server near you, lag wise? Especially with the continuing and ever escalating avalanche of Reddit refugees to reach a zenith on June 12-14?
I’m making this post because I was thinking of making a small website or app thing showing new users a random instance (to reduce load on lemmy.ml or any one individual server). And then that becomes the default “go here to join Lemmy” link for new users. But then I realised I could get the IP (or manually input) location of the user and randomly choose an instance out of the pool of instances nearby.
Anyways, I’m probably not gonna do this myself because lazy (I know) but I think it’d be a good idea.
I’d assume that using an instance hosted closer to you is probably better than using an instance hosted on the other side of the world, but I think the main priority right now would be trying to not overload any particular server. Lemmy is likely to see a steady influx of users as reddit’s API fiasco continues, which could threaten some servers if people overload them.
perhaps some of the very largest instances may be geo load balanced, but most instances will not. assuming equal bandwidth, server hardware and server load, instances that are closer geographically are likely to perform a little better for you. but tbh, any instance that is reliable, not overload and has a decent local social atmosphere should be a candidate home instance for you.
edit: https://lemmy.ml/post/1188619 may be of interest to you.
That already exists :) join-lemmy.org
Slightly OT: It is actually a longer term plan of me to hook Lemmy up to this: http://solarprotocol.net/
So while this is not going to improve latency, it will improve the energy sustainability a lot 🤩
That’s such a cool project!
I mean yeah sure. Physical distance will affect latency negatively and this leads to increased times for establishing connections and can also affect the available bandwidth negatively. Still with todays connections it’s not an issue for me to download with a couple of hundred megabit from a server on the other side of the world. So I doubt that it would have a very noticable effect on the user experience. There are far more important factors like how much load a server has and what hardware a server is running on.