Lemmy.world is very popular, and one of the largest instances. They do a great job with moderation. There’s a lot of positives with lemmy.world
Recently, over the last month, federation issues have become more and more drastic. Some comments from lemmy.world take days, or never, synchronize with other instances.
The current incarnation of activity pub as implemented in Lemmy has rate issues with a very popular instance. So now lemmy.world is becoming a island. This is bad because it fractures the discussion, and encourages more centralization on Lemmy.world which actually weakens the ability of the federated universe to survive a single instance failing or just turning off.
For the time being, I encourage everyone to post to communities hosted on other instances so that the conversation can be consistently access by people across the entire Fediverse. I don’t think it’s necessary to move your user account, because your client will post to the host instance of a community when you make a comment in that community I believe.
Update: other threads about the delays Great writeup https://lemmy.world/post/13967373
Other people having the same issue: https://lemmy.world/post/15668306 https://aussie.zone/comment/9155614 https://lemmy.world/post/15654553 https://lemmy.world/post/15634599 https://aussie.zone/comment/9103641
Let’s say whoever is running the front end doesn’t like a community and blocks it… How do we prevent that?
You don’t have “somebody running the front end” though, it’s all done by the people providing hosting services.
Think “crypto philosophy as a message board” but instead of having everyone sync the whole history you split all data randomly in a way that guarantees it is stored on three servers at all time.
Heck, you could also have multiple front ends if you wanted, all pulling and pushing data to the same servers and this way you could log in from any of them, the front end would only have an influence on UI/UX, in the background the data would always come from the same places and for this reason the front end dev wouldn’t have the power to block communities.
Ok. So just like Lemmy but communities are spread using some hash table over multiple existing nodes?
Yep, divide everything so no one has real power and it’s the users that decide what they want and don’t want on their feed, allow the hosts to decide if they want to host NSFW content or not (and the users can make the same choice), make it so the users don’t have to decide what instance they register with, their credentials are just stored in the database.
For the front end you then have two ways to deal with it, a single one and the hosts “vote” on how to deal with it (crypto style) or the hosts are the database that anyone can access and it allows anyone to create a front end…
Your second scenario where the hosts decide and the users choose the hosts is what Lemmy is doing now
Not really though, with Lemmy the host and front end are the same. You access Lemmy from hacker talks, I access it from shitjustworks, both our respective instances host our respective data and provide us a UI to access their instance and could decide to only give us access to the content that they host as some instances already do.
What I’m talking about is front end devs not having to host any of the content themselves, just accessing the database hosted by others and showing that info in the UI they developed and pushing changes to the database when the users sign up or post comments.
Front end doesn’t have control over where the info is stored and don’t store anything locally, back end doesn’t have control over who’s pulling and pushing data, they can just choose to filter out NSFW content from their own servers but it just means it won’t pick them to host that content and will instead pick servers that don’t mind hosting it.
In this way the hosting is the same as any hosting services but completely decentralized and the data is open to all and no host can wipe it because of the backups (contrary to Lemmy where if an instance disappears all the content it hosted is gone).
So the data would be stored in something like IPFS? Or ceph?
Ceph has issues because the The metadata nodes needed for disc admission are central points of control
IPFS could work, but the cost of hosting go up exponentially. But yeah you could build Lemmy on top of IPFS