You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
98 points

Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can’t catch a break…

permalink
report
reply
78 points

Resiliency is the strongpoint.

If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.

Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.

permalink
report
parent
reply
39 points

If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn’t offer any additional resilience, it’s not a P2P system.

permalink
report
parent
reply
21 points

Stuff like technology has multiple big communities, I can go to the one on .ml .world or beehaw and still get a lot of content

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

Just because anti-lock brakes fail to work in all scenarios doesn’t mean they’re not still an improvement.

Lemmy is still up for most people. That is resilience. If you are affected by this outage, then it failed for you in this particular case but that doesn’t mean the mechanisms don’t exist and that they won’t work to your advantage in the future.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

True but if you have several interests, hopefully spread over several instances, then there is resilience because if one server crashes, you have at least some other things trucking along.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

can fediverse be P2P like i2p?

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

I cant believe this is just coincidence. This is coordinated.

permalink
report
parent
reply
12 points

and that’s just the first month

permalink
report
parent
reply
36 points

Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.

permalink
report
parent
reply
28 points

I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that’s easily solved.

If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.

The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that’s a bad user experience.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

I think it can continue even without the source server? Like, once I press the Reply button on this comment, it gets saved to my instance (lemmings.world) then it lets all the other instances know, including lemmy.world (where the community is hosted) and slrpnk.net where you are registered.

Now let’s say lemmy.world stops existing, my instance still would let all the other instances it federates with know, meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists. Though I’m pretty sure there are downsides to that (like, what if all the mods were from lemmy.world? There’s no admin who can add a new mod).

At least that’s what I think it works like.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

Jesum Crow… Tags aren’t a new concept. Just group communities with a tag… is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points
*

I wonder about this as well – because communities are tied to a specific home instance, that instance going down affects that community, potentially killing it. Something more akin to hashtags/tags/labels wouldn’t be tied to an instance so they would be more robust, though you’d lose the moderation of a community and just have a firehose of posts/comments…

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Wow, you’re right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their “communities”) weren’t tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

It doesn’t have to be a bad ue though. The concept of multi-communities would make it easier to see communities based on topic.

And having a search automation that find like communities, even if just the same community name on different instances would really go a long way.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I’m on it 😁, well at least one little instance more (just gotta make the email stuff work, over OVH if I can do that).

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.

Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.

So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won’t be able to support that load and will ultimately close.

That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i’m misunderstanding.

permalink
report
parent
reply
7 points

No its not really as bad as that at all. The disk space is linear in that way but disk space is cheap. All the rest is not taxed heavily by federation. Do the big costs like CPU dont scale up like that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
10 points
*

At this stage in the game, I’m not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I’m currently on. I’d like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don’t do it here and certainly don’t use the same password for your email associated with your account).

Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone’s passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).

Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I’m sure there’s some that should absolutely be avoided and I’m sure that there’s some that are perfectly fine. But I don’t have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I’d love to join someone’s small instance.

Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there’s the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

You are correct. A lot of the internet is built on trust. This is no exception. I suggest having an account in more than one instance so that you are not too vested into 1 place.

permalink
report
parent
reply
8 points

the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.

as long accounts can’t be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances… most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

I understand the logic but its actually backwards. A small instance like mine is easily paid for totally out my own pocket and requires no outside funding or maintenance because I can do everything. If too few people donate to major instances then the costs starts to run away from the owners. In some ways becoming too large is a problem.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

On a small instance, you have greater opportunities to take action to positively support that instance. You can make friends with the administrator, volunteer to become an administrator yourself, donate cash to offset running costs, lodge helpful reports, welcome new users, etc…

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

My exact same thought process and why I’m here on lemmy.world as well. Once they get the server setup process more streamlined (hopefully dockerized) I’ll probably setup my own private use server, but until I get around to that project I wanted to pick one that didn’t seem like it would vanish once the guy hosting it started getting those hosting bills.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Technology

!technology@lemmy.world

Create post

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


Community stats

  • 16K

    Monthly active users

  • 12K

    Posts

  • 551K

    Comments