this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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My understanding, based on what I've seen with Mastodon, is that, yes, all users will just cease to exist if an instance admin decides to pull the plug. There was some stupid drama with a particular Mastodon admin for a really popular instance a while ago (I forget which server exactly), and they decided to just kill the server. Poof, 100k+ users gone
The potential for accounts to vanish if the instance they started on is, to me, the single biggest hurdle that Lemmy will face with casual users. I think that the devs need to really consider figuring out a way to make user logins global.
I said this the other day, but I think it may, unironically, be one of the first times I've ever seen a genuine use for a blockchain, but I have no idea how to implement it.
The reason that the big social media companies came to exist is precisely because people didn't like having to have a dozen accounts for all their different communities. Lemmy fixes that problem through federation, which is great, but introduces a new problem of "your account could just disappear, making all your contributions vanish." I know that was technically a problem before big social media companies appeared and everyone was using forums, but it's a big plus of the current social media giants- you don't have to worry too much about the company failing so completely that the website gets shut down, which is the only way you'd lose your account, any time soon. People are used to that stability, and will not be happy if they join an instance in the fediverse only to have the rug yanked out from under them.
If we want this to be a true alternative to big social media, it needs that stability.
The other consideration is that impersonation might be pretty possible by making your own server called lemmy.mi or something and then stealing peoples username's verbatim. IDK if that'll ever become an issue but I do think its an avenue of attack for bad actors.
Oh it'll definitely become an issue - Help help my local community! A calamity has befallen me and I need cash now! - Posted by @[email protected]
Yeah, it's basically like email. Though I imagine an instance like that would get defedded pretty quick
Your contributions won't vanish, I can still see comments from people from dead servers on Mastodon because it's cached on my server. The bigger issue is when you set up a new username on a new server, how can you show that you're the old person. So ideally pick a server that has policies in place about offline notices, multiple admins, a funding plan, backups, policies about Nazis, etc.
Not fully on Lemmy. While text posts are cached across all federated instances, medias such as images and videos aren't...
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but media uploaded to a community from another instance is uploaded to the users' instance, not the instance of the community.
This may change in the future, and I hope so.
It was mastodon.lol. Great server early on but the admin Nathan went off the rails in a big way.
that's...really unfortunate
It's part of the reason I chose to host my own rather than depend on another server somewhere. That way when I do fuck it up at least the only person to blame is me
Yay federation and activitypub!
Pardon my ignorance, I've only just started to figure out federated sites (I think, probably not though), what's activitypub?
It's the protocol all the different federated services, not just Lemmy, communicate over.
Smart choice, do you have it set to private? The only thing I'd worry about is people trying to join my server and bogging down my internet lol
I don't have it set to private because when I tried that before it seems to break federation entirely. I do however have to approve anyone who wants to join. At this point I'd probably allow my close friends to join if they wanted, but that's about it.
Mostly because I am nearly 100% positive I will either lose my ZFS array, try to move the server to different hardware and bork psql, or what have you...
My homelab is mostly duck tape and bubblegum.
I'm gonna set mine up to where everyone has to be approved and approve nobody since it'll be running on a Raspberry Pi
I'm really interested in running my personal instance. Can you point me to a tutorial on how to go about that?
Here is the official documentation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration.html