Lemmy and the Fediverse - Growth questions/concerns
Lemmy and the Fediverse - Growth questions/concerns
I’m a reddit transplant and I’m excited about what I’m seeing so far in Lemmy and the Fediverse, but my brain keeps bugging me with concerns:
Maintainability and Scalability - There are a ton of instances now. Lemmy had made it easy to spin up and host your own instance. In some cases, this means people with little/no infrastructure experience are spinning things up and are unprepared for scalability challenges and costs. This post by the maintainer of a kbin instance highlighted this challenge quite well ( https://lemmy.one/post/302078 ). How do we know if an instance is properly maintained, backed up, and is able to scale? Or should we just be prepared to start over on another instance if ours fails?
Monetization - The above cost challenges bring up monetization issues. What mechanisms will instance maintainers have to help with maintenance/hosting costs? As the Fediverse grows, how do we prevent against ads and coordinated upvoting from taking over and pushing ad content?
Legal/Privacy - Privacy regulations are becoming a mine field… GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy frameworks are making it tougher to handle privacy properly. Is there a coordinated Lemmy legal defense or are instance maintainers on their own? How would you even approach a GDPR user delete request across the fediverse?
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Mastodon faces all the same challenges, and has been dealing with them for 7 years.
Unfortunately, lemmy comes with some bad default settings for when you set it up, which is the cause of the current bots inflating the user-count.
As for how to tell if an instance is trustworthy... That'd be time. I picked mine because it's local and has had years of uptime already. lemmy.world is new, but run by people who've maintained a mastodon instance before. Basically, do your research, and wish for the best. Eventually, some day, we'll have established no-brainer options like gmail and proton are for email.
Monetization, that's up to each instance admin. Mine is straight up donating the instance to the world, and not asking for donations due to its near-nothing running costs. My instance is quite small, but active. But really, a given instance could go with whatever funding model they want, provided its users are on board with it. Some have already told our admin to speak up the moment he'd like some funds.
Where malicious activity is concerned, the fediverse may have to eventually switch to using whitelists, instead of blacklists, for who they federate with. Aside from that, there are already some tools for automatically detecting instances that are not populated by real users.
On privacy, ActivityPub has none. For that, you should look to matrix. ActivityPub is for public-only interactions and has no guarantees of security. Your posts or comments are not DMs, and if you reveal personal information, you may as well have published it in a newspaper. There are no real take-backs in that kind of forum. You can have facebook or reddit delete your stuff under GDPR requirements, but your content was out there, and any saved copies are out of reach.
The same goes for deleting things on the fediverse. ActivityPub does have the featureset for it, but it can only reach server's that are still online and federated. That's little different from how other public social media works.
@MentalEdge @homesnatch Therein lies the inherent risk of using social media. You must assume that once the genie is out of the bottle, there's no stuffing it back in there and corking it. I'm probably on some watch list by a few 3 letter agencies because I am pretty outspoken about my views and they run very contrary to the accepted establishment ones. I don't drink the capitalist lemonade, I don't support cops, and I criticize government.
At the same time, you can keep your online account separate from your real identity, if you are thorough. I don't even bother anymore (not on this account), but I'm not open about who I am, either.
Not like on matrix where I just straight up use my real name.
It makes sense to me. There's a place for public forums, and one for private communication. They are mutually exclusive and should not be served by the same systems, they should be entirely separate for anyone who wants them to be.
Not like Meta, with their main public platforms of facebook and instagram, while at the same time sticking their filthy fingers into the private communication pie that is messenger and whatsapp.
Eventually, some day, we’ll have established no-brainer options like gmail and proton are for email.
Thanks but having yet another "too big to fail/block" mastodon.social/online or matrix.org should not be our goal. dot ML and dot world are already "dangerously large" with beehaw and shit just works being close contenders (if not already up there with those two).
Right now it might make sense to centralize just so we can accomodate Reddit folk who don't want to choose, but too much centrailzation is already starting to show it's cracks with e.g. the whole Beehaw situation.
IMO most instances should have a soft-cap of about 5k people or so, after which an invite system (should one be developed at some point) can still bring a manageable amount of people over every so often. Most Masto servers right now that don't suck seem to be running on a similar premise, otherwise it would be hell to moderate, especially with the immaturity/nonexistence of moderation tools.
Oh, I don't think it should be our goal. I just think it's what we'll most likely to end up with.
But 5k is FAR too low.
Instances and the fediverse as a whole function more efficiently, the more users they have, up to the limits of what a single instance can handle. 5k would be at the lower end of whats useful.
The thing with Lemmy in particular is that unlike Mastodon, communities need one instance. dot ML's and dot world's potential future "untouchability" is, in part, because communities will also centralize there. Spreading users very "thin" among the network should also indirectly spread new communities off the big several instances.
And of course. the 5k number I mentioned is both
- out of my ass with no real proof, but also
- a soft cap with a theoratical invitation system (or other way to not lock registrations completely) complementing it
While the numbers themselves likely need adjustment, it definitely should be "lower than you expect"
Let's take lemmynsfw as a rather difficult example. Nobody wants to moderate porn which makes it even harder to decentralize it, but even at 6k users should something happen to it, all the porn in the entire network bar effectively private communities on the few instances that allow it (or the l*licon filled and hopefully defederated burggit) goes away. Not because of its users but because of its communities.
With most instances being general purpose, this will be less of a problem, as for nearly all other communities, there is 0 incentive to centralize in this way beyond "the initial creator had their account here"