Comment on Is my domain "burnt" when hosting my first Fediverse technology?
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 3 days ago
The main issue is when your instance starts federating, accounts are created with a key pair that you will lose when changing software, and generally a whole bunch of URLs will no longer be valid. The actor ID of your user is https://feddit.org/u/buedi, not just buedi. Mastodon might make it https://feddit.org/@buedi instead. As per the spec, that is the canonical URL for the user/actor.
Other instances will still try to push content to your instance assuming the software it was registered with. So you may continue to receive data for Lemmy communities which Mastodon has no clue what that is or what to do with it.
You can host the API/frontend on a different domain no problem, but the actual ActivityPub service should be on a dedicated subdomain to avoid the issues.
That said, I believe after a couple days/weeks, it should eventually sort itself out as your instance keeps erroring out and gets dropped and reregisters with the new software.
Thank you very much for the technical insight. It makes clear why it is how it is and it is good to see that you can host Activitypub services on Subdomains… so the issue I thought that exists is not that big of an issue anymore. Also I love the discussion under your post, very interesting!
Thanks also to everyone else who replied!
One thing to keep in mind is ActivityPub isn’t exactly made for social media in the sense most people use it nowadays. It’s intended to be more like RSS feeds: you’re support to subscribe to stuff like news sites and be able to bring it all into a content aggregator. Seen that way, its design makes a lot of sense.
It kinda works well for public microblogging as well. It’s when you start involving moderation, voting, sharing, boosting that things get kinda weird.
I’ll add some of my comments to that discussion.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
The design choice to hard-bind an instance to a host name still baffles me. It’s an incredibly brittle choice. It makes it pretty much impossible to ever move an instance to another hostname.
Sadly, the fediverse is full of amateurish design choices because it was designed by hobbyists who apparently don’t have anything but a very basic understanding of distributed systems.
Also the concept of “Every instance needs to keep a full copy of everything” and “Every instance has to re-moderate everything to not be legally liable for illegal content” is really bad for scalability.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yeah, I really don’t get the “everything stores a copy of everything” model. It should instead work like a cache, where the OG instance is the source of truth, and instances just keep a cache of that data. Instances should be able to refresh data, or have no cache at all.
I get the desire to not lose data, but that comes with a huge storage cost. If we want redundancy, we should have dedicated caches instead of everything having a copy.
But hey, the Fediverse exists and I’m too lazy to build something better, so here I am.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Yeah, with the current “everything replicates everything” model Lemmy is close to the workable limit of users.
Currently, there are roughly 50k monthly active users on Lemmy, and the hosting cost is approaching unsustainability for hobby instances with a decent amount of users. Monetizing Lemmy is close to impossible with donations being the only real revenue stream, so there’s pretty much no business case for anything but a hobby instance.
If for some reason even just 1% of Reddit users were to migrate to Lemmy (that would be ~10mio monthly active users) Lemmy would instantly crumble under that load no matter how many new instances would be added since every instance stores everything.
Moderation would also all but collapse since each instance needs to moderate everything as well, due to legal reasons. (If someone posts something illegal on a remote instance and it gets replicated to your instance and you don’t delete it, you are legally liable for it since it’s stored on your server.
Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 days ago
Technically it wasn’t really designed with megainstances in mind that swallows the entire fediverse.
My instance has no problem whatsoever keeping up and storage is well under control. But we’re few here subscribed to a subset of available communities so my instance isn’t 90% filled with content I don’t care about and will never look at. Also reduces the moderation burden because it’s slow enough I can actually mostly see everything that comes through.
Lemmy itself is also pretty inefficient in that regard, you can very much make software that pulls instead and backfill local cache as needed.
Even my Reddit subscriptions would be pretty easy on my instance.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Yup, and this has been my chief concern since I came to Lemmy 2-3 years ago and read the implementation details. And it’s not something that can be patched in easily or I’d work on it, it’s a fundamental design choice.
I began working on a distributed alternative, but quickly ran into issues in the design phase that Plebbit is currently running into: moderation is a tough nut to crack. I have ideas on how to mostly solve it, but between a full-time job and young kids, it just hasn’t been a priority.
I hope someone with more time than me can tackle it, especially since I’m not 100% confident in my own solution.