veaviticus

Yes. If you run the server, then you are the source of truth of that community. All other servers that federate your community query your server to access the community and show it to their users.

So if you run a server and a community explodes there, you might only have 500 users on your instance, but you might have 50k users reading that community and interacting with it from other Lemmy instances, thus your server needs to scale to 50k users worth.

And ever more essential, your server is the source of truth of that community. So if your server is hacked or corrupted or deleted, that community is gone. Other instances don't mirror it (except for temporary caching), so the Lemmy network essentially is a trust network of other people maintaining servers long term (and each inventing a monetary system to pay for it). I still think the network might be better than a centralized system like reddit, but it definitely has a lot of growing and policies that need to be sorted out very soon

The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.

The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn't mirror or cache... all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.

I'd vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don't go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.

If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger "open source" server, I'd consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself

A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).

Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn't protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there's currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).

I guess I'd rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don't agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data

That has the same problem as any federated service like Lemmy... all that content only exists at the whims of whomever is willing to run the server and foot that bill. If they decide to delete their server, or just screw up and it dies... all that is gone.

We're basically relying on thousands of individuals to be good quality sysadmins and infosec engineers, all for free.

I guess we could move to a mirroring/caching concept so that no single node contains the only copy of loads of data, but then we're duplicating huge quantities of data.

Like even today with Lemmy, there's now thousands of instances stood up and I bet 2/3 of those will be dead within 6 months. So all those posts and comments that get made on those nodes will just go poof... which might be fine for a chat system, but for forums and microblogging (mastodon) that seems terrible

I think they're saying that they like using the local view as a /r/all type replacement (a view of the highest voted content across all communities). But they'd like to be able to selectively add an entire other instance to their local view.

The only way to do this today is to subscribe to every community on your main instance and every community on the other instance, and use Subscribed as a mega view... But then that ruins the Subscribed view as a selected subset.

To put it another way, I want to view all the best content across N many instances at once, so I can discover new communities.

What's really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?

If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn't mean it's safe from going away at the whims of one person