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.
I think the current model under more mature circumstances is actually the ideal. You want sysadmins to experience the full cost-benefit analysis of running servers. They are functionally countries and should have the risks associated with running a country. A market-driven benevolent dictator/benevolent committee, where the server operators are highly motivated to be good actors, as is currently the case, is the ultimate freedom-security situation.
The risk of a server being able to “vanish” as it were is an essential risk for both community users and community managers to bear.