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.
each domain is hosted by individual groups. lemmy.world lemmy.ml sh.itjust.works individually managed and ran.
In simple terms, each individual server sends and receives content from all of the others and displays it to you. You can interact with lemmy.ml via lemmy.world, for example.
Any individual server could shutdown however content has been shared (federated) to other servers (instances) and stored so depending on content retention, it’s still available.
You can also run a server yourself.
Usually, servers are referred to as instances.
There are types in the fediverse, such as mastodon. Content is shared between them but displayed differently
In terms of commercial interest, facebook wants to eventually federate with their threads app.
Everything else is opensource and community funded, I believe
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?
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?
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.
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.
Users are like coffee drinkers and servers are like decentralized coffee shops that talk to each other (“federate”). Anyone can open a coffee shop and many do. It’s harder and more expensive than simply drinking coffee, but not that bad in the scheme of things, and within reach of average hobbyists with time on their hands and a few bucks to spend.
If the instance stays small, it’s cheap to run. If it gets popular, you can ask users for donations and volunteer help. Lemmy.world is the current biggest, and stays afloat that way.
Right now there’s not much corporate presence, but that may change soon, unfortunately.
Nice analogy, thanks. Good to know Lemmy.world is donation run. Are decisions about the instance made by a collective body?
Theoretically there is community input but at the end of the day, one guy owns it and can do stuff unilaterally. There is occasionally drama over that, like recently the piracy community was removed (from lemmy.world, not from the whole fediverse) due to concern over possible legal hassles. I’d say Lemmy world tries to be friendly and mainstream, while edgier stuff tends to live on other instances. So you can still find what you want.
Nothing stops you from using multiple instances of course. It’s no different from drinking at more than one café. But people tend to have a main one that they visit the most.
Edit: clarify about piracy community.
like recently the piracy community was removed due to concern over possible legal hassles
To be clear, lemmy.dbzer0.com wasn’t removed, it was defederated by lemmy.world. That only affects lemmy.world, it’s still federated with other instances.
Is each instance like another person with a server?
Yes.
Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Yes.
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Idk, they’d be very niche.
Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense!
Nah, you pretty much nailed it.
Lemmy, and a lot of the fediverse, functions very similarly to email. Gmail can send emails to Proton even though they’re hosted by two completely separate companies. A post/comment/vote/interaction is like an email in that a copy of every interaction is sent to every federated instance, like emails sent to recipients. This creates a lot of redundancy and traffic between instances, which has its pros and cons.
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?
