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.
I’m interested in this question for the inverse reason: being able to run a federated community on a Lemmy server which is not open-invite
People in the Lemmyverse would be able to use the community as normal, but running the community on its own server would not involve opening the door to registration by randos on that server.
I think that’s interesting too!
More broadly, it might become a story of the fediverse as it grows … whether it makes sense to move on from an architecture where every node is more or less of the same kind (full instance) to one where nodes take on more specialised and perhaps more optimised roles within the network.