Comment on Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoBut we’re still at the mercy of the admins of the large instances. Most of the popular Lemmy communities are at lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, or sh.itjust.works. Eventually the admins of those instances will either turn evil (I argue that has already happened on lemmy.ml) or stop hosting the service, and then we’re still screwed. I don’t know mastodon well enough, but I’m guessing they have a similar problem with a handful of instances hosting a disproportionate portion of the content.
I don’t know that I can do better, but I can try something different. Plebbit is trying something different as well, so hopefully someone will find a good mix of tradeoffs.
I’m on Lemmy because it’s the least bad option at the moment for what I’m looking for, but I think it’s fundamentally flawed. Apparently the Plebbit devs do as well (or they think they can get away with a grift), and I hope there are lots of others out there quietly plunking away at their own project. I believe Lemmy will die eventually, and I’d really like to have an alternative ready.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
So…
Start alternatives, on a host ypu maintain, and then everything can be ran perfectly how you want it to run
Problem solved.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
That saves the service, but the communities are still dead. The problem is the single source of failure.
ubergeek@lemmy.today 4 weeks ago
There is no real need for the kind of permanence you think you need.
Imagine if a building could only be a bar, for perpetuity, and nobody opened any other bars, because that first bar existed.
Bars would suck for like… 99.99999% of the human population, huh?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Sure, but that analogy only makes sense when talking about real estate. With a distributed system, there isn’t really a limit to what you can store, as long as someone wants to store it.
If someone can just take something down that you value, that sucks. You should never be forced to preserve something you don’t want to, but you should also be free to preserve something you value. Communities should come and go naturally, not because someone decided to stop paying for a server.