What the title says.
A certain Mr. Huffman is making Reddit, which was once the frontpage of the internet (it still is, albeit for different reasons) a living hell for us.
Being in the coding/development trade as my profession, I am a huge advocate of anything FOSS, so when I found Lemmy, I did not look back.
Thanks to PowerDeleteSuite, I got rid of all my contents from Reddit. I did hear reasonings like “leave them there, for the benefits of lurkers” - but nope. I do not trust the sorting algorithm of Reddit anymore, I do not believe people will get to see my content if needed. So yep, blow 'em up.
I kept a close eye for a while on whether my posts and comments get resurrected (yes I did read about people experiencing this) - but I guess PDS did a good job for me.
So there you go, Snoo - you are cute - but creepy Stevie is fucking with your cuteness, and fucking with all of us.
Ooooh… so, not "your seven year old's" account.
Anyway… as a person who searches the internet for answers, Reddit holds many of them. Some of them are wrong answers but some of them are actually helpful. It sucks that everything is consolidated into a handful of resources and people no longer publish their own content on their own sites. It makes for very few organizations holding the keys to "the world's information". So when organizations such as DPReview close down and threaten to remove decades of user created content, the community is disadvantaged. Still, I'm not sold on a decentralized system being a solution. The content is still housed on a sever with keys held by individuals. I don't see how it's possible for Lemmy to become a crawlable resource when ease of migration is built into the system.
Emphasize on the plural.
These "individuals" are exactly that, independent individuals who maintain their own instances, but being federated would mean that the content in each Lemmy instance is visible by other instances (unless they are defederated, which as I understand happens very rarely, and only for irreconciliable differences between instances, which is serious).
And these independent "individuals" spend effort and money to run their respective instances with a common goal, share the info. That's what Fediverse is all about.
Unlike the "individual" at Reddit (singular - looking at you creepy Stevie or whatever Board of
DirectorsFuckers you report to) - where the decision making powers lie really truly at an individual level.That's no good.
So, unless I'm not understanding it correctly, the instance you're a member of could possibly not exist tomorrow. The owner of that instance is responsible for managing the server and if they die or fail to make a payment, that instance is dead. Right? It seems to me that the "defederated" part of this isn't any different than the world wide web. Possibly worse because it's not corporate owned or backed by a large financier.
We're interacting on these instances in good faith that the owners will continue to feel like maintaining it. I understand this is extremely unlikely, but logistically, this is how it works, no?
I have to agree with you on this. What the Fediverse is sorely lacking is a way to "port" our profile to another instance, or at least back our stuff up and restore our home in another instance in case the current instance blows up for whatever reason.
I guess this proposal has been floated already in GitHub but let's see.
I was thinking more about the entire content of the instance rather than backing up or migrating a user account. If Lemmy.ml shuts down tomorrow, the content is gone forever, right?
As a public resource, it just seems less stable to me. The instance is funded by the generosity of the users. How sustainable is that? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years or more? How long should we as the internet community expect our data to reside online? Should there be a reasonable expectation that in 20 years we should be able to search for content from 2023? What about doing a research paper today about the early internet? How many "indie" servers shut down prior to 2003?
I don't have the answer or any exceptions. I'm just wondering if anyone else is thinking about this stuff.
I, too, do not have answers to these questions.
What I do know, is that - "The internet is as Transient or as Permanent as you want it to be".
Public resources like Community funded open source projects - e.g. GNU Project and Linux have long been established names - while inspite of being backed by heavyweight Corporations, people hardly remember Entities like Orkut, Myspace, Digg nowadays.
Yes, indie servers may go down more frequently than their heavyweight corporate competitors, but there will always be new minds cropping up who believe in FOSS philosophy and sharing - because lack of Monopoly is what makes Fediverse a nice place.