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Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts (www.theverge.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 5 points 3 years ago (7 children)

I agree, but I also have serious concerns about this being the replacement strategy. It could be because of my ignorance of how this all works though. Like many of you, I am new and here because of the reddexodus.

These servers are going to cost money, and for many of them the money will run out. Is there a function to preserve the collective content of an entire server once it goes dark? I know that you can migrate your own account to another server, but what happens to everything Google has indexed at Lemmy.world if the worst happens? Is it all just dead links? What if many of the users do not migrate? Is it just gone?

I am concerned that in the current state we are setting up to burn everything that loses a couple admins or becomes too old to economically host.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I was on a mastodon server and the owner decided it was not worth his money to keep running. He did not inform anyone on the server or allow any account backups and all was lost.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    With federated services, I feel like it's somewhat important to get to know the admins of the server you use. You don't have to be best friends, but at least know their name, motivation for running the server, and how it's funded.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    In practice the content is distributed to all the other servers, so people who have been reading it before will still be able to on their own instance, but you're right the indexed domain is gone and so are the results in Google.

    But there is one difference, one instance of lemmy only stores a very small fraction of the content. And it's much easier to fuck up one reddit compared to fuck up thousands of lemmy instances simultaneously. So if one instance goes down, the rest of the fediverse is still up and running.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I think it's a fair concern. We've seen other parts of the fediverse successfully implement crowd sourced funding via patron and similar to keep mastodon servers running and I suspect if Lemmy remains "the place to be" admins will have reasonable success with a similar model. Lemmy is super efficient and can support 100s of users on a single box so I think if 1% of users paid like $5 a month you could probably still support 99% of users "for free".

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    These are certainly possibilities! It's happened elsewhere in the Fediverse... but already we can export most of our data and migrate to a different instance. Getting these base features right is important before enhancing their functionality. Planning for the future is important too. So far I've been impressed by Lemmy, though it's not nearly as portable as Mastodon or Calckey or Pleroma etc. Part of that is that in Lemmy/kbin we don't follow other users... we subscribe to groups (subs/communities/magazines).

    Still, with the nature of ActivityPub, it's inevitable that migration tools for Reddit-like federated apps will get built quick-like

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm sorry, but clearly you have not looked for niche information on Google for a while now. Lots of links end in dead ones, particularly when I am looking for vehicle information on older models.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    I'm not sure what you are trying to say, we shouldn't be concerned because this problem already happened?

    A lot niche older vehicle information, if it wasn't hosted on Reddit, was often on forums funded by enthusiasts, which eventually ran out of money and no longer exist. This is exactly the problem that I'm concerned about. Particularly so if a certain community balloons in popularity and an admin nukes it to keep the server costs under control for the other members.

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