I get the impression that we’re headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest.
I’m wondering whether it would be technically achievable to have servers/instances and federation where the communities are essentially mirrored or have broadly distributed existence - maybe even with user storage a la torrents.
If there’s a large blargh@lemmy.here community and a small blargh@lemmy.there community, all of the discussion, images, contributions to lemmy.here die if the server goes down for good. Yes, the users can relocate to lemmmy.there - even under the same community name - but it’s not the same as having full continuity of a completely mirrored community.
I realize this concept has technical hurdles and would involve a reimagining of how the fediverse works, but I worry we’re just setting up for another blowup at some TBD date when individual sysadmins decide they’ve had enough. If it’s not truly distributed and just functions as a series of interconnected fiefdoms, communities and their information won’t survive outages, deaths, and power struggles.
I don’t think it is that easy. But a good feature would be if you could make backups from communities on other instances in case they go down. It would not save the pics, but you should use a third party image service to keep the hosting costs of you instance lower anyway. In the same way, you, but only you, could download a backup of your account.
Also a good idea would be a new protocol which allows syncing feeds/communities between instance, which effectively is mirroring.
This is what federation already does, mostly. Federation means that threads and comments are copied between instances and kept up-to-fate. You are reading this from a copy kept on discuss.tchncs.de. I am reading this from a copy on kbin.social. The original is kept at lemmy.world. If lemmy.world goes down then our copies remain. They are still readable. But you won’t see my new comment and I won’t see your new comment because lemmy.world was responsible for syncing our copies.
This applies to text posts, links, comments and votes. Images and videos would be gone because they are not copied, just linked to.
That’s correct and that’s the problem. If a given community server goes down, that community basically just becomes an archive. It really needs to be able to continue without the host instance, similar to how a mesh works. Each remaining server routes around the dead node.
There is also the problem of search engine indexing… If a given server goes down, that information is lost to the search engine, even though it’s still on other nodes.
Which also leads to duplicate content problem for search engines, as ECU m each node of a given community contains the same information for a given post, making it crappy to index and search.