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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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The biggest issue is who pays for the server infrastructure at scale.
This made me wonder - what happens if my chosen Lemmy server goes down? Do I lose my account?
Hopefully, some kind of account portability is possible or in consideration. Even if it's a manual download of settings and subscriptions that could easily be uploaded to another instance.
As of right now, yes your account would go poof. Mastodon currently has a way to migrate servers, but it hasn't been implemented in Lemmy yet. I'm sure at some point it will become available, but if you are worried about all your posts I'd make local backups for now.
Thanks. I'm not really worried about my comments, nothing I'm saying is that useful long term. It's more the list of subscriptions, that would be a headache to recreate.
Agreed that would be a huge pain.
I had to reinstall my local instance, and wasn't able to import my old database. That meant I had to go re-subscribe to everything and even worse, nothing on my account will actually federate. Comments I make on the "main" admin account won't federate anywhere, because the instances see that "old" user with the same name, but exchange is different.
So I had to create this second account, and use this to comment on things with. It's a pain, but hopefully it gets better. Even if it's just being able to export my subscriptions so I don't have to try to find them all again.
We just need Wikipedia style funding. If the server publishes their costs and fundraises, then people can support it directly. Instead of the stick and carrot of subscriptions or the rat race of ads, just be open and honest about server needs. If the users aren't able to raise funds, then cut back to what's affordable. Users will either deal with the reduced server capacity or they'll need to pay up to continue enjoying it. This doesn't need to be a free ride, but I trust the community will rally for a good service.
A lot of server owners do this already. The instance I'm on for example does this and also disclosed that they would donate any "proceeds" to the development of Lemmy. So they are only paying for upkeep costs.
The counter is that there are federation costs too. For relatively balanced nodes that should not matter. But if you are a small instance with a lot of popular communities it might be a problem. Plus you will never get a large fraction of people contributing. So those that can will need to remember to give a solid contribution.
The Fediverse seems like a good place to implement a distributed, block chain based peering setup. Join a community and share the hosting
OMG why do tech bros try to force blockchain into everything
Think less "Bitcoin" and more "Freenet." IMO the point shouldn't be to try to monetize stuff, it should be to decouple content from the instance it was posted on (i.e., to mirror popular content across instances to distribute the load) while still maintaining control and attribution for the user that posted it.
But how does blockchain, as a technology, help with that? The Fediverse already has a mechanism for distributing content across multiple instances.
I think at this point even tech bros hate people that try to insert the blockchain and cryptowhatever into everything.
That's not going to work for web hosting. The only reason it works for crypto or folding is because each request takes minutes to run and there's no time dependence on returning the result. Additionally, they don't need much data and all data needed is dispersed with the task.
Websites are completely different. Each individual request is tiny, taking milliseconds to process. Each request is very time dependant, you have a person literally waiting for the result. But the biggest issue is that what people really want is stuff from a database. So that database would need up grant full access to everyone, meaning anyone could change whatever they wanted. Lastly, that database would need to be hosted anyway so you've gained nothing.
Don't suggest tech solutions when you don't have any idea what the problem or solution actually involves.
At a simple level- a lot of that happens already.
Moving around between communities is quite seamless, even though most of them are hosted on different servers, and even different parts of the world.