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One Small step, a giant leap for Fediverse but...
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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A scary thing about the Fediverse right now is that some instances have many of the bigger communities. And the owners of the instance can literally shut it down at any moment (or stop federating with you).
And right now there isn't an incentive to keep instances alive.
I like how matrix handles the rooms, you can have aliases on other servers for the same room. This would be also nice for communities. So once there is a server split you at least keep the old content on the other servers simmilar to when one matrix server goes away everyone can still be in the room which is an alias for it.
May be worth keeping some local communities in that case, which can also serve as sort of backup for wider community from other small servers. For example, if there is "Knitting" on a big instance, you can consider creating something more specific like "Knitting full RGB sweaters" on your smaller instance. Then there is a basis for sustained discussion there, and more people can come if something breaks. I have some ideas for comms like this that I'll maybe come around to creating.
I don't think we need to keep full centralization be-where-everyone-is mentality here. Or maybe be where everyone is, but don't make it the only place where you talk with people.
True, I'm not really concerned about the active users dissapearing, because most of them would just join the second biggest community about that topic.
I'm more concerned about the ammount of information/knowledge that would be lost.
I get what you say about not having a be-where-everyone-is mentality. But the fact is that following 15 communities about the same topic is really inconvenient, and people tend to congregate (look at how many users each instance has and you'll see that a few instances have like 80% of the total users).
If we want the fediverse to succeed we have to simulate centralization for a better user experience, while being decentralized. And that means that there should be some sort of protection to prevent whole communities from dissapearing.
Yeah, I'm not disagreeing there is a convenience and ease angle, but I think there's a middle ground where we have 2-3 communities for major interests with somewhat different vibes or approaches, so there is a topic reason for them coexisting. This already happens in the old school forums ecosystem. Fediverse's advantage here is that you hopefully don't need separate accounts.
Re: loss of knowledge, if some instance/community does a purge, I'm assuming the old posts are still there, at the very least on the instances that used to be federated with them. I suppose it would be a nice to have a feature for admins for "freezing" their public backups of mirrored communities when they get defederated. It's not that different of a scenario from standard Internet drama, we just have to handle this nicely.
I agree with other people that the right to defederate is to be respected. If we rely on one hub community somewhere to congregate, this is only kinda decentralization. At the very least the central hubs shouldn't be on instances that are too defederation-happy.
On the other hand, I see the argument that many users means more difficult moderation, where defederation might be a band-aid as they say on beehaw. The question is if they have too ambitious moderation goals to handle being a central hub, and maybe indeed it would be better for their communities to be sort of internal to them.
On Mastodon there's a self-destruct command that in theory deletes your content from all of the instances that are federated with you. I thought the same command was on Lemmy but it might not be the case.
Then you would be right that the old posts should remain on the federated instances.