The federated concept is nice. But I feel like what will happen in the end is that most of the content will end up on few instances. This still gives power to the owners of these instances, and if they delete the instance a lot of people would lose accounts?
What would be your ideas to improve this and have less centralization?
Make it possible to migrate from one instance to another, with all of your account history. Not sure about is it technologicaly possible to prevent making accounts with fake history.
Good idea. Possibly be able to download locally a database od your account and upload it to another instance
Mastodon let’s you do exactly this, I think lemme should too
People who want near-perfect distribution of power often talk about the serverless model. It’s sounds like it might work for something like e-mail, but I don’t see how it’s possible for something like Lemmy. This comment it cached on every instance with one person who follows it.
Atm, keeping Lemmy going for a couple of days might require 50 Gigabytes and lots of bandwidth. If you put that on a mobile phone, it’ll be a 50 Gig app, which will drain all your data in minutes.
But I think chatboards work well with servers, so it doesn’t seem like a problem.
Make it trivial for users to move their accounts between instances, and very hard for instance admins to block. Ideally it would be possible to migrate an account even after an instance shut down, but that is probably impractical to implement.
We also need to consider how to mitigate the threat to communities (I think that’s the term. Lemmy’s equivalent of subreddits). If big communities are tied to specific servers then we have the same issue with server admin power.
Content is basically avaliable to everyone regardless of what you end up choosing. At worst, they can block an instance from interacting with another.
Most problems can just be solved by moving to a new instance that meets your needs. Or if you really must, make your own with your own rules.
My concern is an instance shutting down and losing access to all that information. I can always make a new account, but losing all that info from the entire instance could be a big problem. Maybe by then tho people will archive them somehow.
The most extreme case I can think of would be instances blocking everyone but themselves or a few select instances, and forcing everyone within them to follow their rules to access it. But I feel like that would be hard to pull off, people would just jump ship way before it gets to that point.
I will see how Lemmy develops, but if I do stick around, I think I will host my own private 1-person instance.
