this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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.
undefined> Unless there’s some sort of mitigation, like a federated subscription list+multi"reddits" or something similar
Sounds like an argument for the return of the glorious 90s' webrings and site directories. Because, honestly, the idea that the content has to be "everywhere" is just unfeasible. As we say in Chile, the key is not knowing everything, is knowing the phone number (or web address) of the guy who does.
I created a site directory early on to mitigate this issue but it was too much work to manually curate, even with help. Webrings is a nice idea, but I can't really see moderators send users away to competing, practically identical communities. In my experience they rather just crosspost to their own.
I think my dream solution would be to subscribe to all know i.e. !gaming communities and post to my local gaming community knowing everybody will see my posts because my community is included in the "subscribe to all known !gaming communities" that others have subscribed to.