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Instance getting too centralized? (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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EDIT: Thank you all for your answers, now I'm reassured this platform is in good hands and we will always have the freedom to switch. Let's make this place vibrant, diverse and decentralized, like the old web used to be.

I feel like this instance is getting too big and all the content is being centralized here. Am I right or there are other instances thriving too?

Wherever I go I keep seeing lots of lemmy.world users and communities and kind of feel worried about centralization.

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[–] 10 points 3 years ago (7 children)

There's still a world (no pun intended) of difference, between a single company with a single instance that doesn't interface with anything else. And a large instance on a federated network :)

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Yup, I feel like a lot of people complaining of too much centralization don’t fully understand how the federation concept works. Even if a single instance goes down, turns evil, ect - all of the content would have already propagated to all the other instances. It’s not ideal, because those instances would loose sync with each other since the initial instance went dark but we wouldn’t loose the content but commenters can still discuss within their own instance.

    Again, not ideal - but at least the content would be preserved.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    So if lemmy.ml subscribed to lemmy.world, and world shut down with no warning, provided you aren't a lemmy.world account, you can still access and make content on the world communities? Has this been tested?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (3 children)

    this happened with lemmy.world and beehaw. after the defederation/shutdown, the blocked instance still has the old communities/threads and can interact with them, but they won't be synced out to the rest of the fediverse.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I'm trying to figure this out from a high availability standpoint. I guess the next question would be if all the servers are operating on the same out-of-sync server, probably not, as those servers aren't connected together, they are just connected to the now-offline server. I wonder if the server comes back up if it propagates or trys to re-sync. Seems like we would have issues either way, and the best bet is finding an instance with good availability.

    I was kind of hoping that if an instance subscribed to another instance's community, then the originating instance can go down without effecting the community because another instance is now acting as the backup.

    I'm also concerned if Lemmy as an application can support a large user base.

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

    My understanding is that in the activitypub fediverse there's considered a "true" version of a post/thread/etc. This is the one that is hosted on the instance that it was made. For example, the "true" version of beehaw communities is the one on beehaw. So all other instances then ask beehaw for the true version, and beehaw sends it to them. When someone makes a post on a beehaw community, they send that info to beehaw specifically. Then we simply indirectly see each other's comments due to syncing with beehaw.

    When someone then gets blocked by beehaw, such as lemmyworld, lemmyworld still has their copy of the beehaw communities and threads. It's still their copy of it on lemmyworld. However, they can't go ask beehaw for updates, and they can't send their content to beehaw. As a result, no other instance would get lemmyworld's posts on beehaw communities, and lemmyworld will stop seeing new posts on those communities from other instances (other than beehaw).

    There might be something that lets the instance grab the data from another "non-true" version. But I don't know if that's the case. I was told no, but idk.

    I was kind of hoping that if an instance subscribed to another instance's community, then the originating instance can go down without effecting the community because another instance is now acting as the backup.

    My understanding is no. While each instance makes a copy, I think without the originating instance, they end up falling out of sync. There is a way to fix this theoretically (since p2p does it), though I don't think the fediverse is doing this. I think it might work for mastodon posts that you "reshare" though? I'm new to the fediverse so idk the details.

    The way I think of it is more like internet achive copying reddit posts. if reddit dies, IA still has those posts. Yet IA's version can't accept new posts, and if reddit dies they don't get anymore updates.

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