So what happens to your account if the server you joined goes down? Yes, you could always create a new account somewhere else, but you lose all your followed communities and post and comment histories as well.

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[–] AyyLMAO@exploding-heads.com 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

can someone start up a server on their personal laptop?

Anyone can start a lemmy instance on their Raspberry micro computer, personal laptop, dedicated home server, script-compatible NAS'es and on and on.

But most Lemmy instances are hosted on VPS's for stability and scaleability.

The other problem is that eventually you will have only a few large servers because people who join will want as much content as possible.

This is an issue I've talked about before with the general response of "It'll sort itself out". Now, a few years later it's total fragmentation and a budding centralization with the new "megainstances".

I envision special interest servers that are monolithic in community nature, dominating certain topics. Unless there's some sort of mitigation, like a federated subscription list+multi"reddits" or something similar.

[–] idle@158436977.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I suppose, the more I think about it, the same is true right now, except instead of a single instance having a monopoly on a topic, its reddit. I totally agree though its a valid concern, and I think something like multi reddits is the answer. If I can just subscribe to all instances that are tagged under a certain topic, then all those other instances can host content and still get visibility, instead of being crushed by those mega instances.

[–] AyyLMAO@exploding-heads.com 2 points 1 year ago

If I can just subscribe to all instances that are tagged under a certain topic,

That's sounds like a good idea. Instances can be very diverse, I think it would be better to tag individual communities but all that's hypothetical. At the moment, anything is better than nothing.

[–] nintendiator@lemmy.fmhy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

undefined> Unless there’s some sort of mitigation, like a federated subscription list+multi"reddits" or something similar

Sounds like an argument for the return of the glorious 90s' webrings and site directories. Because, honestly, the idea that the content has to be "everywhere" is just unfeasible. As we say in Chile, the key is not knowing everything, is knowing the phone number (or web address) of the guy who does.

[–] AyyLMAO@exploding-heads.com 3 points 1 year ago

I created a site directory early on to mitigate this issue but it was too much work to manually curate, even with help. Webrings is a nice idea, but I can't really see moderators send users away to competing, practically identical communities. In my experience they rather just crosspost to their own.

I think my dream solution would be to subscribe to all know i.e. !gaming communities and post to my local gaming community knowing everybody will see my posts because my community is included in the "subscribe to all known !gaming communities" that others have subscribed to.