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You’re posting this on lemmy.world. The owner of this instance, the biggest new instance, is literally building out a business of instance hosting.
If this goes well, and his business grows, it will have chief executives.
But there will be other instances. If this one does something stupid, then we go to another one and miss almost nothing.
That's a bit like saying "Yeah so we don't care what reddit does, because you can always go somewhere else"
It's the biggest instance, so it's where most of the community and content would be etc etc. Just like what happened with beehaw could happen to world as well. This is only true for a mature decentralized federated ecosystem with a lot of redundant communities so that if one goes down you can easily consume the same content from a different instence. Is that the case now? I would say no, so it's even less leader-proof.
Lemmy is perfectly fine with beehaw defederating.
There is certainly the risk of a single instance dominating. But even now there are a few significant instances and losing beehaw didn't ruin anything.
True, but a lot of the main communities I subscribed to were in Beehaw, so I've mostly abandoned my lemmy.world account and moved to a smaller instance that's less likely to get defederated from
The main point, or why it's fine is because it's new. Losing it is not really that important right now, because being honest. We're a grain of sand in comparison. So It's not much that we lose. But extrapolate and now you have 50 million users on .world and suddenly they shut the server down. Not defederation, it shuts down. Sure you can say "oh well.. I guess time to start over" I would wager most people will be like "Nah, fuck this... I'll go somewhere else that might not implode" right now we're on the reddit hate train and hyped the fuck up. Later on those servers will be getting bigger and more expensive. Some might cover it with donations, some might not.
If we have ~5 major instances, then yes a loss of 10 million is not good, but it certainly doesn't kill lemmy. There's no need to start over, there's no need to change anything.
If the fediverse is healthy, it can handle that kind of loss without any issue. If we get all funneled into 1 or 2 instances, then yeah, we're gonna have problems.
Why so doom-and-gloom already? We just moved from Reddit and peope are excited about the possibilities that fediverse brings. Which are undeniably much broader when compared to Reddit.
Of course we don't know what is going to happen in the future, but this model certainly has better chances of being run "by the people for the people".
I don't care that the admins of lemmy.world money make a business out of it. In fact I would be glad if they did.
Having said that they know perfectly well what happend to Reddit when the company wanted to become more authoritarian. And we are talking about people jumping ship from Reddit to fediverse which is way big of a deal than people jumping from one instance to another which, once you are versed and familiar with how fediverse works, is child play.
My point is that the only business to make with fediverse is the one that servers the users, that is, a "CEO" or a collective will have no option but deeply care what the users want and need to make some bucks. Otherwise this enterprise can collaps really quickly when people jump to another instance.
It's definitely good, but it isn't full proof. Nothing is.
r/boneappletea
Sorry I couldn't resist
Guess it's my turn
RIght. It does depend on there being multiple major instances.
It depends what he's the CEO of. For example whether it's a non-profit, a for-profit, a co-op, etc. It also depends on the licensing of the data. I don't think this last bit has been tackled by Lemmy yet. Wikipedia has done it quite successfully. If the data is licensed under CC for example, and backups are published, then migration of the whole instance becomes possible like it is for Wikipedia. That would be one hell of a disincentive to fuck around, even if the company is for-profit. Non-profit co-op plus CC-licensed data is probably the most resistant.