Comment on Welp that answers a lot of why all .ml are down

• null@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that’s easily solved.

  If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.

  The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that’s a bad user experience.

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  • rikudou@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I think it can continue even without the source server? Like, once I press the Reply button on this comment, it gets saved to my instance (lemmings.world) then it lets all the other instances know, including lemmy.world (where the community is hosted) and slrpnk.net where you are registered.

    Now let’s say lemmy.world stops existing, my instance still would let all the other instances it federates with know, meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists. Though I’m pretty sure there are downsides to that (like, what if all the mods were from lemmy.world? There’s no admin who can add a new mod).

    At least that’s what I think it works like.

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    • miles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists

      oh really? does it actually work this way? if lemmy.world dies, can all its communities continue to live on as long as there are lemmy instances out there federated and subscribed?

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      • Illecors@lemmy.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        No. You would only ever be interacting with a snapshot-at-the-time-of-death of the community on your local instance only. It is the home instance of the community that federates all events, not the instance of the originating post/comment/vote/whathaveyou.

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  • miles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wonder about this as well – because communities are tied to a specific home instance, that instance going down affects that community, potentially killing it. Something more akin to hashtags/labels wouldn’t be tied to an instance so they would be more robust, though you’d lose the moderation of a community and just have a firehose of posts/comments…

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  • forrcaho@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Wow, you’re right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their “communities”) weren’t tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.

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    • thisusernameistaken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      no need to resurrect it, usenet still exists and has a bit of discussion traffic (and a lot of binary traffic) but we just need to get users to swap over. course there needs to be some decent mobile apps made as well.

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  • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Jesum Crow… Tags aren’t a new concept. Just group communities with a tag… is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?

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    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There needs to be a way for a person or group to essentially own a tag to enable moderation. It might be one of those rare problems for which a block chain is a good solution, because there would need to be a public ledger showing who is a moderator for a tag at any given moment.

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      • nintendiator@feddit.cl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        There is no need to own a tag, nor to tack blockchain into a problem to try and sell a solution. Ever.

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• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  At this stage in the game, I’m not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I’m currently on. I’d like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don’t do it here and certainly don’t use the same password for your email associated with your account).

  Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone’s passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).

  Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I’m sure there’s some that should absolutely be avoided and I’m sure that there’s some that are perfectly fine. But I don’t have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I’d love to join someone’s small instance.

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  • Thief@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You are correct. A lot of the internet is built on trust. This is no exception. I suggest having an account in more than one instance so that you are not too vested into 1 place.

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• Cyyy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.

  as long accounts can’t be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances… most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)

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  • Thief@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I understand the logic but its actually backwards. A small instance like mine is easily paid for totally out my own pocket and requires no outside funding or maintenance because I can do everything. If too few people donate to major instances then the costs starts to run away from the owners. In some ways becoming too large is a problem.

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    • Cyyy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.

      and you can’t really backup your account and load it somewhere else, so if this happens everything you saved and do is GONE. thats a huge risk if you value your account and contribution to communitys.

      so it doesn’t really matters to me if smaller instances are not expensive etc… thats not what fears people. its the suddenly vanishing without warning that scares people.

      i had this often enough with similiar other projects where i created a account on such a small community / instance, was really active… and suddenly it was just gone from one second to the next without warning. everything gone. admin didn’t told anyone about it… was just gone into thin air.

      so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.

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      • Thief@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        “i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.”

        Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.

        “so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.”

        There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.

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  • jackoneill@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    My exact same thought process and why I’m here on lemmy.world as well. Once they get the server setup process more streamlined (hopefully dockerized) I’ll probably setup my own private use server, but until I get around to that project I wanted to pick one that didn’t seem like it would vanish once the guy hosting it started getting those hosting bills.

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• iraldir@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.

  Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.

  So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won’t be able to support that load and will ultimately close.

  That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i’m misunderstanding.

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  • Thief@lemmy.myserv.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    No its not really as bad as that at all. The disk space is linear in that way but disk space is cheap. All the rest is not taxed heavily by federation. Do the big costs like CPU dont scale up like that.

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• Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m on it 😁, well at least one little instance more (just gotta make the email stuff work, over OVH if I can do that).

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