So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:
ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?
REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?
PRIVACY: I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?
SERVER ISSUES: This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases. Communicating across more and more instances is going to be extremely taxing. Access issues/desyncs seem like they’ll be inevitable. Doesn’t a federated system have more trouble scaling up than a centralized one because of this? How could small independently run servers keep up with exponential processing costs? Won’t this just squeeze out smaller instances? Add this to issues when instances choose to defederate, and you have two competing incentives: spreading out users to keep server stress low, and centralizing users to keep local engagement high. Isn’t this kind of a big hurdle?
Sorry for the wall of text- excited about lemmy in general but really have no idea about whether these are issues.
The issue will come if your beloved communities are in different instances defederated from each other. You will have to move to a instance were those are not defederated. So it’s crucial to have the option to migrate our user easily through instances. I read its feature that’s coming . At some point it is the best solution to be decentralized in a difficult scenario as a social link aggregator and discussion platform. I’m mostly worried about the actual data and content that will be wiped if a instance dies because the admin decides to delete it all. There should be a a protection on that. My other concern is privacy too, it’s pretty easy to track users activity from inside and outside. On this point is our responsibility to take measures and take care of our IPs and emails which are the two points any entity Can point to our real identity. For this, VPN and email aliases. I see the whole thing very hard to use for those internet users that don’t want to bother and just scroll . But at some point that would split the waters between poor and rich quality of users.
If a community you like gets defederated from your home instance you can also create an account on the communitie’s instance instead of migrating your old account to an instance that federates with exactly what you are looking for.
