It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of “millions of users”, which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.
I wouldn’t be surprised if someone will do an ad-supported service. Or just do a straight-up subscription service – I mean, Usenet providers do that. Means that you don’t risk having your instance just vanish, someone handles security updates and load issues and so forth. Different models could coexist at different levels of reliability and performance and whatnot.
On the reliability issue, from my very quick skim, my kneejerk reaction is that I do think that the Fediverse might need some improvements in dealing with resillience due to instances going down permanently. As it is, that happens – due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what – the accounts aren’t available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down. Publish a pubkey prior to an instance failing, and then permit a “transition to a new account” mechanism where a user can prove to the system that they are an older user. Key management – storing and retaining a private key – might be a bit of a pain without a third-party app, as I don’t know if there’s a convenient way to do that in browsers today.
Another might be having some mechanism to deal with node failure. Freenet deals with having a fundamentally-unreliable distributed storage mechanism by having a level of forward error correction and then distributing some redundant data around the network so that it’s possible to regenerate a certain amount of lost data when a node leaves the network from the data on remaining nodes.
As it stands, I don’t think that lemmy/kbin have something like that. They must retain copies of some of the data – hence the “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance” message that kbin shows if I’m looking at a community on lemmy.world from kbin.social. But unless it’s cryptographically-signed by lemmy.world, if lemmy.world vanishes forever, kbin.social cannot prove that its copy of data originating from lemmy.world is authentic, so it cannot be made re-available to other lemmy/kbin instances.
Yes something like this should definitely be implemented. Mastodon has the feature of “moving your account” from one instance to another, but I haven’t tested it yet. Don’t know if it has anything like you mentioned like key management.
That was one of the things that I very-briefly skimmed, and why I mentioned the pubkey thing, as it sounded to me like doing a migration on Mastodon involved having the source and destination instance both active. Like, you wouldn’t use it in the aftermath of an instance being lost forever, which I’m pretty sure is gonna be a use case that is gonna come up before too long.
This is the one thing that bugs me the most with ActivityPub - identities are tied to instances. Hopefully folks are still working on nomadic identities.