this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
It's their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more ~~power over~~ users, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
I suspect that with time (and support) the Devs will probably introduce account-migration.
Yes, and I think that's probably a necessity. But that doesn't help if the server has already gone offline, you'd need notice I expect.
I understand that you can create your same username on another server. Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your 'ghost account' or your original account on the other server?
Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it's not already taken. dave@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.com are the same username but different servers. You don't get dave@gmail.com reserved just because you have dave@hotmail.com, but if it's available you can register both.
Lemmy is pretty young and there aren't a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people's accounts.
Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that's more about moving your followers to your new account. I don't think the posts move. This page claims there it's a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn't have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.
None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.
Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you're missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It's very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they're all discussing the issue assuming an audience that's already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta's entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don't really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can't personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I'll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it's software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don't know what the code is behind Facebook and they don't want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don't follow any Meta communities and don't use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there's a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Happy to answer further questions!
Shit thats scary! Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?
Because it definitely sounds like that’s their intent. There’s no benefit to Facebook embracing an ad-free, trackerless standard unless it’s taking over.
Thank you for your clear explanation btw!
There is a movement to get Fediverse instances to agree to block Meta. I guess if everyone did this, the Fediverse would continue on and Meta would probably be fine building their own platform.
But Meta has something the rest of the Fediverse doesn't have: money. They can simply pay some carefully chosen instances to Fedirate with them (which might be what the secret conversations are about).
There will also likely be a bit of a fight between instances that do or don't Federate with Meta, some thinking it's good because of the new userbase and some thinking it's bad because of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing. That alone will probably cause damage as well, possibly splitting the already small userbase into two factions.
Meta is making a twitter/mastodon-like site, so Lemmy might get to have a wait and see approach, but if Meta start changing (Extending) the ActivityPub protocol then the dozens of different platforms on the Fediverse will all have to decide whether to change too or no longer be able to Federate with anyone who does change.
One of the benefits of Facebook Federating with Mastodon is the users. Building a new platform is hard but if on day 1 you can already follow millions of others then this helps. But after a month thay probably won't be very important, so it will be interesting to see what they do next.