Excellent!

Me neither!

Fantastic!

Agreed. It sounds to me like lemm.ee is in good hands.

I think it’s natural that there should be a small collection of large, production-class instances that host the vast majority of users. The important point is that there are more than a few, and certainly more than one.

I also think it is important for instance admins to lay out their plan for how they intend to host and fund an instance if they intend to be production-class.

We also need some kind of account backup and migration tool so that if an instance goes down, those users can easily recover on another instance.

We’ll, they could always be isolated from the main fediverse network. Ultimately it will be good moderation on your instance that is the deciding factor. If another instance won’t moderate or has a content policy that allows it to collect offensive material, then your instance will have to defederate.

I’m sure there will be a few distasteful Lemmy instances out there that have been defederated from all mainstream instances, but I guess that’s OK, because they can do what they want in their own space.

That’s one thing I really like about Lemmy. You can’t forcibly silence people* you can only disconnect/isolate them. (*unless you own their instance).

So we should focus on maintaining the health of the main fediverse network (the interoperability between mainstream instances that are responsibly moderated).

I think it’s only older people who remember what the internet was like before everything became corporate controlled or SEO optimized.

I always found it hilarious and sad when people interacted with brands. “Someone you know liked Walmart”. Why?

In an SSO scenario, your home instance would still need to be around to act as the IDP. I don’t think that adds much in terms of functionality over what we have now.

The ability to backup and migrate your account is critical to prevent losing your data if an instance goes down. SSO wouldn’t help you in that scenario.

I’m liking Memmy a lot so far.

That’s a very good point.

I think a lot of people don’t care, and a lot more people just have no idea what’s going on. You have to be hyper-aware of how your data could get farmed in order to prevent each new service from collecting it.

I think that universities are perfect for hosting instances (of Mastodon too). It would be a great teaching opportunity, and the cost seems like it would be negligible.

When I was a kid, our internet connection was actually hosted through the local university. It makes sense for them to participate in distributed platforms like this.

Excellent work. Thanks for all that you do to run this fabulous instance!

While I certainly like having the choice of so many servers, and I think it’s smart to spread the load, I also understand why people would want to make sure they are in a stable server that has a reasonable chance to stay around. You have to put a certain amount of faith in the instance owner.

I agree with him that there is inevitably a strong tendency toward centralization, but I think a key feature to help with that would be the portability of one’s account to new instances. Even if the majority of users are in only a few instances, there is still a safeguard against one entity (I.e. corporation) directing the health of the whole system. If accounts were portable, when an instance went foul, people could move and the system as a whole would self-heal.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting article. And the cost and challenges of running a web scale service are not conducive to small time players.

I agree. Ultimately, I think there is a real chance that there ends up being 2 major fediverses. One that is federated with Meta, and one that is not.

I think that those joined to meta will ultimately become like the losers table in a school cafeteria. They can hear all of the conversations, but nobody will engage them. I’d rather be in the not-federated camp.

Amazing! This gives me hope for the future of the internet. It was always meant to be distributed, not centralized into a few corporate hands.

Lemmy has definitely been able to replace Reddit for me. And although I don’t fully understand the fediverse either, I am super intrigued by the concept. I hope this style is the future of social interaction on the internet.

Same. I like it (and miss Apollo). But I also like the web interface too.