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 1 week 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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[–] oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I love this idea. As others have said, a distributed game server would be a really tall order, and AFAIK there's not really anything already made that does what you're describing. But you could have a setup where one server hosts the game and syncs the game state with the other servers in the network, and if one server fails the network decides which failover server to connect to, all the clients connect to that server and continue playing on the new host. But it would be a gargantuan task to implement something like that.

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

But you could have a setup where one server hosts the game and syncs the game state with the other servers in the network, and if one server fails the network decides which failover server to connect to, all the clients connect to that server and continue playing on the new host.

This is kinda what I was hoping that kubernetes did. It'd be awesome if there was some software that automatically did the hand-off, but I haven't heard of one either

[–] oddlyqueer@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago

It does something similar, in that you can replicate servers and have one act as a failover for another, but I think you'd need a lot of extra code to sync the primary game host with the failover hosts, and more to make sure all the clients detect a failed host and all gracefully switch to the same failover host, and probably a hundred other things I'm not thinking of. If I were going to build something like this I probably would look to kubernetes as a foundation but there would be a lot of customization on top of that.