this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Yeah, I do like throwing hot takes out there. XD But I do think that you are asking a lot when you ask people to limit the scope of their instance.
It will always be easier to just add another community under a larger instance than to go out and self-host your own niche from scratch. There's certainly a temptation for an instance to go mega and general-purpose.
I'm not disagreeing that a single instance is a point of failure- just that people are willing to make that trade-off.
I was never insinuating that an instance owner should limit their scope. But just because you run an instance doesn't mean you have to be the home node for all the communities you are interested in. It goes against the idea of federation. If a community already exists on another instance, as an instance owner you should subscribe to that community rather than making your own. That increases resilience.
How does that increase resilience? I would say the opposite increases resilience, multiple communities for the same topic on different instances. Putting all your eggs in one basket is not resilient, it puts everyone on the whim of the admins of that instance.
Interesting. Do you think there will be steps to make communities more focused? Like a hypothetical deal where lemmyworld will give up "gaming" if kbin gives up "technology"?
Honestly, I hope not.
For example, if all the "programming" communities ended up on a single instance, that is still a single point of failure. I think it would be better if they were spread out a bit. That way if the programming themed instance went down unexpectedly it wouldn't take ALL the programming communities out with it, only the ones it hosts.
There's nothing stopping anyone from creating a programming themed instance and then subscribing to various programming communities on other instances and then creating their own local communities to fill in the gaps. And ideally, I think that's what should happen.
I'm often wrong, but I have a hunch that it will be necessary if the goal is to avoid centralization. I do think it would be sensible to limit the broadest communities (politics, tech, gaming) to two central "node" instances; very curious to see if it will get to that point.