So if I understand this right, you pick a server and your server account can post on that server and any servers that that server federates with.
So what happens to your account if the server you joined goes down? Yes, you could always create a new account somewhere else, but you lose all your followed communities and post and comment histories as well.
The same holds true for monoliths like Reddit and Facebook and Twitter. What if they decide to just turn it off? In those cases you just lose everything. Period. With the Fediverse, if one instance turns off, then we just lose the stuff on that single instance. Everything else you have been following or doing is still there.
By and large, though, Fediverse instance operators are a communicative lot. If things are going to go south and the instance is going to go away, my experience has been they’ll give you plenty of warning to move elsewhere and work to preserve whatever data you would like to keep.
But in those cases, the users trust that the server hosting the platform they are on isn’t just some guy’s Personal laptop.
Are there any stability requirements for starting up a server or can someone start up a server on their personal laptop?
The other problem is that eventually you will have only a few large servers because people who join will want as much content as possible. Basically the “Google” problem.
can someone start up a server on their personal laptop?
Anyone can start a lemmy instance on their Raspberry micro computer, personal laptop, dedicated home server, script-compatible NAS’es and on and on.
But most Lemmy instances are hosted on VPS’s for stability and scaleability.
The other problem is that eventually you will have only a few large servers because people who join will want as much content as possible.
This is an issue I’ve talked about before with the general response of “It’ll sort itself out”. Now, a few years later it’s total fragmentation and a budding centralization with the new “megainstances”.
I envision special interest servers that are monolithic in community nature, dominating certain topics. Unless there’s some sort of mitigation, like a federated subscription list+multi"reddits" or something similar.
I suppose, the more I think about it, the same is true right now, except instead of a single instance having a monopoly on a topic, its reddit. I totally agree though its a valid concern, and I think something like multi reddits is the answer. If I can just subscribe to all instances that are tagged under a certain topic, then all those other instances can host content and still get visibility, instead of being crushed by those mega instances.
The content from ALL is the same regardless of being from the same server or not. Yes, larger servers will have larger internal traffic so perhaps browsing will be faster. Small servers can still exist with few problems, especially if people prefer to only receive their subscribed posts.
ALL from Lemmy.world and ALL from other servers are not all the same. Each server has its own list of other servers which they federate with and some don’t necessarily federate with all the others. At least this is how I understand it and it confirms my observations and others have confirmed this as well.
This is true, which is why a solution will pop up maybe in the form of a website that could track what servers federate with what. People could choose a completely open server or a server that defederates the volatile ones.
Yeah it’s the issue with this ‘middle ground’ of federation. some ideal world would be fully p2p, identities fundamentally would rest with the user’s device or backed up somewhere public and encrypted, then servers just become meeting hubs or caches of content. there’s some protocols that already do this at a technical level, secure scuttlebutt and nostr are two. there’s other issues that crop up, for one moderation and content discovery starts to be a lot more complicated.
so, not a solved problem by any means, but federation at least gives us a bit more freedom than a singular centralized service.
In mastodon, you can move your account into another server. Technically it just copies your accounts, disables the old one and instructs all people following you to follow the new one. Here we don’t have the “follow” problem, so less hassle, but not clear what happens to the communities of a shut down instance. Do they stay cached in other lemmies, but unable to post more into them?
I don’t know if there’s a community transfer feature though
There should be a failsafe for this because as this grows, you’d also have a lot of servers which are not feasible to maintain anymore and thus they’d go down. Maybe an instance dedicated to archiving could work. Other instances could refer to that archive in order for users to migrate without losing their settings.
You post and comment histories would likely still be saved on any instances that federated with them previously, I would imagine.
This is correct, I can find old posts from an account I deleted ages ago from an instance that doesn’t exist still floating around those we federated with.
Well, if it was ages ago, instances may have gotten wise to the fact that your account is gone and deleted the posts by now.
Yeah an easy way to migrate/backup accounts would be nice. Also a way to backup communities so all of the content doesn’t get lost.
