Lemmy.world is very popular, and one of the largest instances. They do a great job with moderation. There’s a lot of positives with lemmy.world

Recently, over the last month, federation issues have become more and more drastic. Some comments from lemmy.world take days, or never, synchronize with other instances.

The current incarnation of activity pub as implemented in Lemmy has rate issues with a very popular instance. So now lemmy.world is becoming a island. This is bad because it fractures the discussion, and encourages more centralization on Lemmy.world which actually weakens the ability of the federated universe to survive a single instance failing or just turning off.

For the time being, I encourage everyone to post to communities hosted on other instances so that the conversation can be consistently access by people across the entire Fediverse. I don’t think it’s necessary to move your user account, because your client will post to the host instance of a community when you make a comment in that community I believe.

Update: other threads about the delays Great writeup https://lemmy.world/post/13967373

Other people having the same issue: https://lemmy.world/post/15668306 https://aussie.zone/comment/9155614 https://lemmy.world/post/15654553 https://lemmy.world/post/15634599 https://aussie.zone/comment/9103641

    • @[email protected]OP
      19•6 months ago

      If the front end is a single website, then it can be taken down, and provides a central weak point.

    • @[email protected]M
      8•6 months ago

      As a DevOps Architect, let me make it simple:

      With a single front-end, you have a bottleneck. If you have one domain (website) that everybody goes to to get to the front-end, that means that domain is the single point of failure.

      In my line of work, we use load balancers and sub-domains to divide the work and provide resilience (High Availability), but at the end of the day, if the DNS for that site goes down, we’re down.

      Also, as Jet mentioned, whomever whoever controls the domain (website) controls the content. You can’t have multiple groups controlling a single domain. Whomever buys it controls it. If they don’t like content, they could easily block access to it.

      I’m oversimplifying the inner workings, so if you want more details, let me know.

      EDIT: subtext called me out on my crap English. Have nobody to blame but myself. English is my first language.

      • @[email protected]English
        5•6 months ago

        I just want to let you know that “whom” is only ever used as an object. In your sentences, I think you should have used “whoever”.

        The easiest way to remember which you should use is to think about the difference between s/he==who and her/him==whom.

        She gave the ball to him Who gave the ball to whom

        She controls the domain Who controls the domain

        The domain is controlled by him The domain is controlled by whom

    • Kalcifer
      2•6 months ago

      Decentralization should be a background thing with hosts providing server space like you would get from a service like AWS and the front end being a single website with users not knowing on which server their content is hosted and backed up.

      You could potentially run into issues with data storage reliability:

      • What happens if some server hoster were to simply delete their hosted data? Would the data simply just cease to exist? You would end up needing to duplicate it some amount of times to statistically ensure some level of security in the data, and, even then, it’s not a guarantee.
      • How do you ensure that the data doesn’t get tampered with when it is stored on other people’s untrusted servers? You would need some way to digitally sign data with a user key, which carries with it many potential catches.
      • You would need to make sure that the data, and networking needs, are distributed according to what the server is able to provide.

      I understand that these things could still happen, to a similar extent, with the current model of Lemmy, but they are less likely to occur, given that you can choose which instance to join. These are all not unsolvable issues, but this is not a simple “better” alternative — it’s more complicated than that.

      All this being said, there is a service that I have heard a little bit about that is sort of similiar to what you appear to be looking for called Nostr.