Hey all. Not sure if this is the right place to post this, please point me in the right direction if not:

So I only came here because of the exodus from reddit, but I’m pumped to see this community and all this technology people have been making. It’s like a return to the old-school, user-operated internet instead of the big awful silos that have been dominating the landscape since the early 2000s. I’m in.

So quick question, are there plans or projects in the works for distributed hosting (making it easier for the users to take up the load of storing and hosting content so the instance operators aren’t stuck with the hosting costs)?

I ask because I’d like to work on a project to implement this, as I feel it’d be a massive further step forward. I’m not sure though if there’s anything existing I should be trying to get up to speed on or if I should be thinking in terms of starting my own project if I want to be working on it.

  • mo_ztt ✅OPEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Hm, yah, this a really good point.

    So, I thought through what would be a good way to move forward what I talked about and came up with this. Originally I was thinking in terms of trying to have a world-shared data store, so that something like what you’re envisioning would be trivial (if your instance goes down, all your data is still there in the shared data store, so you just use your same user and all your stuff on a different instance transparently), but then I scaled it way way back from that plan in order to make it doable.

    And actually, depending on how things are structured, it might be possible to do something like what you’re talking about with my approach. If you read my proposal, I’m talking about having data stored on what I call “peers”, and you’d definitely need to have your peer configured so that all your user’s data is mirrored there permanently. I think that that means it might be possible, if your instance went down or you wanted to move to a new one, to grab your user data from your peer and move it to a whole new instance and have it work there in the same way. Same for a community, by the moderators of that community. Maybe. It’s too far ahead of what I understand about Lemmy and what I’ve fleshed out about how the system works for me to say anything about it for sure though.