Lemmy.world is very popular, and one of the largest instances. They do a great job with moderation. There’s a lot of positives with lemmy.world
Recently, over the last month, federation issues have become more and more drastic. Some comments from lemmy.world take days, or never, synchronize with other instances.
The current incarnation of activity pub as implemented in Lemmy has rate issues with a very popular instance. So now lemmy.world is becoming a island. This is bad because it fractures the discussion, and encourages more centralization on Lemmy.world which actually weakens the ability of the federated universe to survive a single instance failing or just turning off.
For the time being, I encourage everyone to post to communities hosted on other instances so that the conversation can be consistently access by people across the entire Fediverse. I don’t think it’s necessary to move your user account, because your client will post to the host instance of a community when you make a comment in that community I believe.
Update: other threads about the delays Great writeup https://lemmy.world/post/13967373
Other people having the same issue: https://lemmy.world/post/15668306 https://aussie.zone/comment/9155614 https://lemmy.world/post/15654553 https://lemmy.world/post/15634599 https://aussie.zone/comment/9103641
The problem is how Lemmy itself was built.
Decentralization should be a background thing with hosts providing server space like you would get from a service like AWS and the front end being a single website with users not knowing on which server their content is hosted and backed up.
As a DevOps Architect, let me make it simple:
With a single front-end, you have a bottleneck. If you have one domain (website) that everybody goes to to get to the front-end, that means that domain is the single point of failure.
In my line of work, we use load balancers and sub-domains to divide the work and provide resilience (High Availability), but at the end of the day, if the DNS for that site goes down, we’re down.
Also, as Jet mentioned, whomever whoever controls the domain (website) controls the content. You can’t have multiple groups controlling a single domain. Whomever buys it controls it. If they don’t like content, they could easily block access to it.
I’m oversimplifying the inner workings, so if you want more details, let me know.
EDIT: subtext called me out on my crap English. Have nobody to blame but myself. English is my first language.
I just want to let you know that “whom” is only ever used as an object. In your sentences, I think you should have used “whoever”.
The easiest way to remember which you should use is to think about the difference between s/he==who and her/him==whom.
She gave the ball to him Who gave the ball to whom
She controls the domain Who controls the domain
The domain is controlled by him The domain is controlled by whom
In this case the solution, as I mentioned in other comments, is to make the back end the decentralized database that’s accessible to anyone so the people developing a front end don’t host the data and you can use any of the available front ends to connect to your account as it’s not attached to any specific front end (your info is in the database).
Front end devs would be competing to provide the best UI/UX, but in the end everyone would have access to the same data and front end devs couldn’t get in the way of the data or if they did then people could just go to another website without losing anything.
If the front end is a single website, then it can be taken down, and provides a central weak point.
Not really if in the background everything is divided over a bunch of servers and backed up by other servers
It’s the only way to solve the centralization of users, take the option away from them and handle it in the background.
Let’s say whoever is running the front end doesn’t like a community and blocks it… How do we prevent that?
Like raid 6 or higher. Data is distributed with included redundancy to make up for nodes dropping off.
But then community admins would need to backup their communities as raid is not backup.
I just don’t know how that would work with the data… restoration distribution across new nodes etc etc. but then … I’m not a dev.
Raid doesn’t work in this context. Because we’re assuming we have antagonistic peers. So Central control of any element, gives away control of the whole system.
In a redundant array of inexpensive disks, there’s the assumption that there’s bunificent administrator organizing everything.
Decentralization should be a background thing with hosts providing server space like you would get from a service like AWS and the front end being a single website with users not knowing on which server their content is hosted and backed up.
You could potentially run into issues with data storage reliability:
- What happens if some server hoster were to simply delete their hosted data? Would the data simply just cease to exist? You would end up needing to duplicate it some amount of times to statistically ensure some level of security in the data, and, even then, it’s not a guarantee.
- How do you ensure that the data doesn’t get tampered with when it is stored on other people’s untrusted servers? You would need some way to digitally sign data with a user key, which carries with it many potential catches.
- You would need to make sure that the data, and networking needs, are distributed according to what the server is able to provide.
I understand that these things could still happen, to a similar extent, with the current model of Lemmy, but they are less likely to occur, given that you can choose which instance to join. These are all not unsolvable issues, but this is not a simple “better” alternative — it’s more complicated than that.
All this being said, there is a service that I have heard a little bit about that is sort of similiar to what you appear to be looking for called Nostr.
Just like libertarianism would soon lead to single party Government, then eventually to Democracy, most people just want a less shit version or Reddit.
This whole Federation thing is a good principal, but most people just wanted a less crappy version of Reddit.
Most people may have just wanted a less crap version of Reddit, but how you make Reddit less crap is that you spread out the moderation and also don’t grow power in admins. That’s what federation (mostly) does. I just think we need a way to transfer a user and also to load multiple profiles.
I also don’t understand why federation needs to be the way it is. I feel like instances could present a “read-only” version of themselves to defederated instances so that users could at least read the posts but not interact.
Leave Lemmy.world for other reasons too.
I’m still irritated that when I signed up last summer, it was like: it doesn’t matter which instance you choose because we’re all connected.
It’s not true. Lemmy.world relies too much on banning communities and even entire instances. I am the one who should be entitled to make those decisions, not Lemmy.world.
Consider coming to SDF Chatter or Lemmy.today instead.
Remember when they allowed the piracy communities just to get rid of them again?
sshhh… it just works :)
cause shit just works, yknow?
