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.
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.
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.
That’s sounds like a good idea. Instances can be very diverse, I think it would be better to tag individual communities but all that’s hypothetical. At the moment, anything is better than nothing.
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.
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.