Decentralization is a double edged sword, you just have to accept you give up some things to get other things.
Comment on lemm.ee is shutting down at the end of this month
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks agoI like Lemmy, but it’s not decentralised enough to avoid things like this.
I think it’s inevitable right now, even if it’s a lot rarer than it was during the great exodus from reddit. You’re reliant entirely on the goodwill of volunteers.
User accounts are unique only to an instance, and there’s no way to move them. If we want to avoid this, having multiple homes on an account would be a good first step. You probably don’t want them going everywhere (as that would need login details, which while hashed wouldn’t be immune to bad actors getting them). But making a new account elsewhere isn’t hard, it’s just annoying to lose your history.
Any lost communities are much harder to replace. Links get broken, etc. You can’t move those either, so have to make them anew and convince people to update any links before they vanish.
Honestly not sure if Lemmy’s approach is a good one or not. Recently we’ve had transphobic users from one instance harassing people on another, and without things like IP addresses, it’s hard to stop that. Your own instance also has to host a bunch of stuff from other places, and you can end up with illegal content being copied to your own hardware if hosting an instance. Maybe it should be on the instances to host communities, and on the clients to gather things from multiple servers.
Zenith@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sorry this might be obvious, but even if an instance disappeared with all its communities, wouldn’t those communities and their content still exist as copies to other federated instances? My understanding is federation means I’m going to copy all of your content to my instance. So I’m assuming that means even if your instance stops existing, all those copies on my instance still exist. Or am I missing something?
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Not 100% sure. As a guess based on how I think the Fediverse works, I think they’d exist, but new comments and posts would cease to sync around, so they’d effectively be only on your instance.
moseschrute@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I guess my point is that historic data won’t cease to exist unless all the federated instances deleted the data or also shut down. And links would only be broken if you are access the data via lemm.ee. But if you’re accessing data via one of the federated instance’s APIs, I think you should be good? But I’m still relatively new to all this federation so I would appreciate if someone smarter than me chimed in.