I get the impression that we’re headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest.
I’m wondering whether it would be technically achievable to have servers/instances and federation where the communities are essentially mirrored or have broadly distributed existence - maybe even with user storage a la torrents.
If there’s a large [email protected] community and a small [email protected] community, all of the discussion, images, contributions to lemmy.here die if the server goes down for good. Yes, the users can relocate to lemmmy.there - even under the same community name - but it’s not the same as having full continuity of a completely mirrored community.
I realize this concept has technical hurdles and would involve a reimagining of how the fediverse works, but I worry we’re just setting up for another blowup at some TBD date when individual sysadmins decide they’ve had enough. If it’s not truly distributed and just functions as a series of interconnected fiefdoms, communities and their information won’t survive outages, deaths, and power struggles.
One minor correction: if lemmy.there has users subscribed to [email protected], the content that is federated to lemmy.there won’t vanish if lemmy.here does: that copy is more or less independent once it’s federated out.
It’s not a 100% complete clone, but it’s also not at risk of totally vanishing off the face of the earth, either.
There are issues with further interaction with that group (since the host instance is gone and it won’t federate back up and then out to other subscribers), but the content does still exist anywhere it was subscribed to.
You could in theory nominate one instance to take over a community. They would then hack their database a little to make it local.
But, I could be wrong. Doesn’t lemmy use the original URL for media? So you would lose that unless the transfer was co-ordinated before they shut down. Kbin does take a copy of the media and self hosts, which of course comes with its own problems.
The media was something I didn’t consider, but yeah the original image is served from the original posting server.
That’s probably trivial to fix, given other fediverse software locally caches and serves images, though yeah, that requires an extra level of trust and more work for admins in the far too likely case of CSAM or other illegal content.