It does highlight a potential problem with the way the fediverse functions, if too many communities are controlled by a single instance. The fediverse was meant to allievate centralisation, but in reality it has only slightly alleviated it (at least for some instances).
How big a percentage of lemmy would be lost if the lemmy.world servers was disconnected in the same way for example?
End of the day, shit cost money. As much as people love to live in bullshit denial about that fact.
Unless people are willing to pony up said money for free out of their own goodness with no strings attached AND you find people that are entirely trust worthy to manage those funds and put them entirely and only towards the intent they were given.
You will always find the same problem. Shit HAS to be centralized. You can have more then one central pillar that stand together but at the end of the day all your doing is spreading the load.
You can’t have an infinite number of pillars either it’s just not possible. And that’s the “idea” behind shit like federation. That some magic bullshit will happen and we will totally spread the load, costs and burder so perfectly that it can’t be knocked down.
When in reality it’s even more fragile than a single pillar supporting everything.
You have to find a middle ground, a number of central pillars that support each other. But you have to accept your just creating a more unstable house of cards.
Where a single sole pillar is easily corrupted, a group is easily toppled.
The frediverse is slowly learning that the idea behind it is a lot more iffy in reality then on paper. Hopefully it will adapt and not just stubbornly ignore the problem because of stupid shit. Because I fully believe that given enough effort the “decentralized” path as laughable as that term is. Is the right one forward.
I have very little faith in people to not be stupid tho.
If it’s optional then you don’t solve any problem. If it’s not optional you create new problems.
It’s very catch 22.
Cause if it’s optional then all you have done is create various size bubbles of failure that don’t actually solve anything. It also create admin abuse vectors.
If it was an option in this case, this wouldn’t have happened because the guy who made a replacement on piefied wanted to be able to do something like that but couldn’t.
Depends on what “percentage of Lemmy” means, but they have probably something like 20% of active users. Most of their communities have analogues elsewhere.
I do think that as Lemmy grows the idea of a “general purpose instance” will go away and online communities will form their own instances.
It does highlight a potential problem with the way the fediverse functions, if too many communities are controlled by a single instance. The fediverse was meant to allievate centralisation, but in reality it has only slightly alleviated it (at least for some instances).
How big a percentage of lemmy would be lost if the lemmy.world servers was disconnected in the same way for example?
End of the day, shit cost money. As much as people love to live in bullshit denial about that fact.
Unless people are willing to pony up said money for free out of their own goodness with no strings attached AND you find people that are entirely trust worthy to manage those funds and put them entirely and only towards the intent they were given.
You will always find the same problem. Shit HAS to be centralized. You can have more then one central pillar that stand together but at the end of the day all your doing is spreading the load.
You can’t have an infinite number of pillars either it’s just not possible. And that’s the “idea” behind shit like federation. That some magic bullshit will happen and we will totally spread the load, costs and burder so perfectly that it can’t be knocked down.
When in reality it’s even more fragile than a single pillar supporting everything.
You have to find a middle ground, a number of central pillars that support each other. But you have to accept your just creating a more unstable house of cards.
Where a single sole pillar is easily corrupted, a group is easily toppled.
The frediverse is slowly learning that the idea behind it is a lot more iffy in reality then on paper. Hopefully it will adapt and not just stubbornly ignore the problem because of stupid shit. Because I fully believe that given enough effort the “decentralized” path as laughable as that term is. Is the right one forward.
I have very little faith in people to not be stupid tho.
Agreed. To maintain health there needs to be a easy way to backup and migrate communities and user profiles between instances.
Without this theres just 1000 single points of failure rather than one.
Either that or communities should be able to propagate across instances.
Not by default, but there should at least be a way to treat it like a hot fail over if the instance admin chooses to enable it.
If it’s optional then you don’t solve any problem. If it’s not optional you create new problems.
It’s very catch 22.
Cause if it’s optional then all you have done is create various size bubbles of failure that don’t actually solve anything. It also create admin abuse vectors.
If it was an option in this case, this wouldn’t have happened because the guy who made a replacement on piefied wanted to be able to do something like that but couldn’t.
Depends on what “percentage of Lemmy” means, but they have probably something like 20% of active users. Most of their communities have analogues elsewhere.
I do think that as Lemmy grows the idea of a “general purpose instance” will go away and online communities will form their own instances.