this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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How to set up a decentralized game/chat server (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 8 months ago by mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I've been kicking around the idea of running a server for games and chat woth some of my friends, but worry about everyone getting cut off when there's a disruption.

I've started looking into kubernetes out of curiosity, and it seems like we could potentially set up a cluster with master nodes at 3+ locations to hose whatever game server or chat server that we want with 100% uptime, solving my concerns.

Am I misunderstanding the kubernetes documentation, and this is just a terrible idea? Or am I on the right track?

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[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Actually I can provide a little more detail. Check out how Matrix handles event graph resolution/desync. It's why messages sometimes come in out of order. This is a fundamental problem with decentralization: authority breakdown. The homesever in Matrix is considered the authority for the clients, but within the Federation itself there is no true authoritative party or event history. If a server goes off federation for a while, a room will split, and once it re-federates it and other servers will have different event graphs, assuming something happened in those rooms in the meantime for both the defederated server and federated server(s).

Basically: videogames assume that within a certain amount of latency the server's state is permanent and authoritative. Federation breakdowns even for 500ms can destroy a games running state.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for the detailed explanation

It sounds like my friends and I are better off just having 1 primary server running everything, and pushing backups to 1 or 2 other servers that can be spun up if/when things go wrong with the primary server.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 8 months ago

Yeah probably.

Even big Minecraft servers are just many servers with load ballancers. The game has server redirects built in for this reason.