Hexbear enjoyer, absentee mastodon landlord, jack of all trades

Talk to me about astronomy, photography, electronics, ham radio, programming, the means of production, and how we might expropriate them.

He/Him

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 12th, 2020

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  • I thought communities synced over instances so if an instance goes down, communities are still accessible. Is this not true?

    This is not true. ActivityPub (the protocol Lemmy instances use to speak with one-another) does not intend to be a redundant, distributed datastore. There are a few reasons for this. One is practical. It needs to be affordable to start a new instance. If the requirements for starting a new instance entail mirroring significant parts of the fediverse (a network of over 2 million users and 22,000 instances) it would be impossible for anybody to do it unless they were Google/Facebook.

    Another has to do with trust. A community has a home. That home is chosen (ideally) because the admins can be trusted. That instance is the universal source of truth for that community. If communities didn’t live on a specific instance, they would be vulnerable to various forms of hijacking. The home instance has the final say on who has permission to comment, and who has permission to perform moderator actions. None of these actions could be trusted if they weren’t cleared by the home instance first. Third party servers perform basic validataion against the currently known ban list / mod list / etc, but this could easily be spoofed by malicious instances.

    When an instance goes down, it is kind of similar to a netsplit on IRC. A queue of outgoing messages build up on your instance, which can be seen on your instance. Queues of messages queue up on other instances, which can be seen on other instances, but they won’t be synchronized until the destination instance returns (this depends specifically on which inbox the messages are directed towards - I’m not particularly familliar with the specific implementation in Lemmy).

    Finally (though not really), ActivityPub isn’t designed to be a broadcasting protocol. In the case of Lemmy, and other Reddit-like clones, it effectively acts as such, but it is intended only to send messages to the places they belong. If you post a message and the subscribers to that message only exist on 3 servers, that message ONLY gets sent to those three servers, even though there are thousands of servers in the network (at least, this is how it is supposed to work in theory).

    I might have some details wrong here. I’m more familiar with how Mastodon works (and how it fails) at this point after troubleshooting various problems on my instance.




  • I feel like PeerTube hasn’t broken through yet in the way Mastodon has, and Lemmy is kind-of broaching on. Mastodon itself is heavy for what it does. I need 8GB of RAM, >600GB of storage, and 2 CPU cores to run a 100 person instance. Lemmy is leaner (as well as some microblog style alternatives to Mastodon like Misskey / Pleroma). Peertube, on the other hand, can only get so lean. Hosting video content is orders of magnitude more intensive than hosting a text-based message board. It is much more costly to do this, and to compete with platforms like YouTube, it is not sufficient for just spin up a single instance. You also need to work out CDNs, caching, load balancing, etc.

    Like Jack said, I’d just find an instance you vibe with and post stuff there, but it will take a lot of resources to grow the network as a whole.


  • Here’s one perspective: https://runyourown.social/

    Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car’s gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.

    About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord “server.” Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren’t doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.

    Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn’t afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.



  • The lack of “Lemmy etiquette” is basically the whole point of the project. There is no general rule. There are places for shitposting, there are places for serious discussion. The civility fetishists get their corner, the people who enjoy replying to bigots with pigpoopballs.jpg get their corner. There is a niche for everybody - and if there isn’t - you can start one without being completely isolated from the rest of the network (at least, initially).

    The situation on Reddit was absurd. The “Reddiquette” rules were generally okay, but very open to subjective enforcement. I spent many years on Reddit. I browsed a lot of different communities on there. But if one person on a community I browse makes a post saying “look what this asshole is saying” on another community I browse, and I go there an make an insightful comment, I am now “brigading.” If somebody wants to politely debate whether trans people have a right to exist, or whether or not we should send the homeless to concentration camps, and I tell them to fuck themselves, I am being “uncivil.”

    Communities need mods and admins who have their back, not mods who become cops for the admins who become cops for the board of directors who only care about increasing KPIs and profit. The coolest thing that can happen on the Fediverse is landing in a place where the admins will eat a block or two to defend the integrity of their communities. This is something which is simply impossible on Reddit.


  • PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.mltoMastodon@lemmy.mlAnti-Meta Fedi Pact
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    1 year ago

    Facebook launched in 2004, 19 years ago, and bears more responsibility than just about any organization in Silicon Valley for the proliferation of abusive, invasive, proprietary, walled garden social media platforms. They function as an integral pillar of the state’s mass surveillance and propaganda operations. They have been complicit in many pogroms, including a genocide in Myanmar.

    I assure you, they haven’t suddenly had a change of heart. They have a long history of acquiring their competitors and rolling them into their own private corporate infrastructure. If they intend to make a move on the Fediverse, there is no reason to believe their intent is any different than what their corporate history demonstrates. If they have their way, the Fediverse will end up no different than Instagram or WhatsApp.