Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.
Is each instance like another person with a server?
Yeah. I would assume that most, if not all, open instances are going through a 3rd party hosting service, but nothing stopping them from being hosted on hardware in somebodies home.
Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Yup. Anytime and for any reason. It might cause a moment of disruption, but the beauty of federation is that you can always setup an account on a new instance or create your own.
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Yes. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Facebook federating their Threads services. I’m sure that there are others.
Thanks, helps a lot!
If an instance is closed, would everyone’s accounts and posts on there be lost?
Accounts, yes. Posts, not necessarily. I joined during the great Reddexodus, when the influx caused several instances to go down temporarily. What I recall happening was the communities that were mirrored to other instances still had accessible posts and comments, but they were essentially frozen? Like you couldn’t contribute any more to them without the host instance coming back online.
I think the way it works is if you are the first to subscribe to a community from a non-local instance, its content gets synced to yours, which adds some resilience in case that the remote instance goes down. At least that’s my impression of how it works.
Not lost, but inactive / isolated. As I understand it, when a user on insurance A subscribes to a community, votes, or comments on a community on instance B, that content is copied to insurance A and the two instances will sync their changes together. If instance B shuts down or the two instances defederate, then the content on instance A stays intact, but it no longer syncs with the source of truth.
Okay, so does that mean you could potentially protect your own account from an instance being shutdown by making sure to subscribe to communities in other instances?
I think this is a little too glib about instances shutting down. If this happened it would lose not only my subscription list but also many of my favorite communities. It would take quite a bit of work to reconstruct what was lost.
You can export the list of subscribed communities in 0.19.
If you do that every now and then a shutdown would still hurt. As all the communities hosted on it would be lost but at least you can import your subscription list on another server.
Is each instance like another person with a server?
I just wanted to add, any computer with an internet connection can host a web page! A desktop, a laptop, anything. That’s how the internet all started, as a collection on interconnected computers sharing data. I think many people nowadays forget this or even never knew about it (including me), since we live in a world where people spend all their time at like only a dozen websites. (Google, Instagram, Wikipedia…)
I have a public “webserver” in my basement. It’s just some random computer hosting some photos for family members. And it’s all completely free, I don’t pay anything to do it. I could easily pop an instance of Lemmy on it too.
The biggest hurdles in setting up a server from home are needing some technical knowledge, and a free domain name / URL usually looks a little silly (unless you pay for one), and getting hacked is a very real threat unless you pay close attention to security.
Many ways around that these days. Dynamic DNS, CloudFlare tunnels, tailscale funnel, reverse SSH tunnels, etc
My setup uses a reverse proxy hosted on a free Oracle VPS that feeds through tailscale VPN, so it doesn’t really matter where the devices are connected, as long as they are connected to the tailscale VPN, the reverse proxy on the vps can serve the stuff
I run Plex and about 30 other things including my own website through it all without any issues
If you created a Lemmy server, then you would be the owner of that particular instance, and yet another node in the fediverse. It’s not owned by anyone, really. The entire point of activitypub is that it’s entirely agnostic.
Of course the servers are ownes by someone, what are you talking about? The thing is just that not all servers belong to one entity. So lemmy couldn’t be turned off because one person decides so.
I think you misunderstood the person above you. The servers are owned by someone, but the Fediverse as a whole isn’t. You’re both saying the same thing ☺️
Is each instance like another person with a server?
Individual person, group of people, nonprofit, company, governments, political parties, whatever. Anything goes.
Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Yes. That’s why it’s advisable to join one with a dedicated group of committed individuals, or run your own. Joining super small servers might sound nice, but the owners might just ditch it.
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
There are some run by companies, yes, for example social.bbc which is run by the British Broadcasting Corporation. gruene.social is run by the Greens (political party) in Germany, and social.overheid.nl is operated by the Dutch government.
There will probably be some company-run instances that don’t allow user signup, since all they do is feredate with everyone and exfiltrate data. It’s what people do…
What do you mean by the company-run instances? Like for internal communication?
No, I mean companies that have only one objective - gather user data. Advertisers, marketing agencies, AI language models, corporates. If they federate with other instances, they essentially copy all posts and messages (including private messages!) over to their own server, and can then run it through data analytics software for whatever use case they have, try to match your user profile to other advertiser profiles they already have on you, etc.
And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s simply how a decentralized network works. Every node in the system can see all the data and use it as they see fit.
And there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s simply how a decentralized network works.
It’s also how the internet works, and you wouldn’t need to set up an instance to scrape the data from lemmy.
I’m of the impression that only the origin and destination servers see any given private message, but I haven’t verified this. Anyway, don’t expect them to be really private. I’d worry more about reddit since pm exchanges there can be intensely private, there is a single evil corporation saving them all, and the user population is mostly oblivious to that.
When I’ve had something private to discuss with a reddit user, I’ve asked them to switch to email. They are sometimes willing but not always.
Didn’t think about DMs. Can’t they keep a private key for you in your home instance and then encrypt all DMs to external users with their public key which the home instance makes available for that user?
Each instance is its own server/website but the servers talk to each other.
People and companies can both host their own instances though I am not aware of any servers owned by businesses.
If someone shut down an instance all the posts that have already been federated will still be on the other servers that instance has connected to but there will be no new posts.
The Fediverse in general does have instances owned by companies like how Mozzilla has its own Mastodon server.
I also think the Owners of wordpress also showed interest in the fediverse though I am not sure if they went anywhere with that.
This comment is an example of federation since I am from kbin.social but you are from lemmy.world yet I can see your post and comment on it.
