Trying to wrap my head around the fediverse. Is each instance like another person with a server? Could that person just shut it down whenever they wanted to?
Are there any companies that have invested in hosting Lemmy/ other fediverse servers?
Sorry I’m sure I messed up some of the terminology, I hope my questions make sense! I love the idea of the fediverse as I understand it, but I like to dig into these details.
Yeah. I would assume that most, if not all, open instances are going through a 3rd party hosting service, but nothing stopping them from being hosted on hardware in somebodies home.
Yup. Anytime and for any reason. It might cause a moment of disruption, but the beauty of federation is that you can always setup an account on a new instance or create your own.
Yes. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Facebook federating their Threads services. I’m sure that there are others.
Thanks, helps a lot!
If an instance is closed, would everyone’s accounts and posts on there be lost?
Accounts, yes. Posts, not necessarily. I joined during the great Reddexodus, when the influx caused several instances to go down temporarily. What I recall happening was the communities that were mirrored to other instances still had accessible posts and comments, but they were essentially frozen? Like you couldn’t contribute any more to them without the host instance coming back online.
I think the way it works is if you are the first to subscribe to a community from a non-local instance, its content gets synced to yours, which adds some resilience in case that the remote instance goes down. At least that’s my impression of how it works.
Is frustrating on a new instance though when you have to wait for the content to appear though, lol
Not lost, but inactive / isolated. As I understand it, when a user on insurance A subscribes to a community, votes, or comments on a community on instance B, that content is copied to insurance A and the two instances will sync their changes together. If instance B shuts down or the two instances defederate, then the content on instance A stays intact, but it no longer syncs with the source of truth.
Okay, so does that mean you could potentially protect your own account from an instance being shutdown by making sure to subscribe to communities in other instances?
Yes, but they would be separate accounts (comments, subscribed y communities, messages, etc). I have an account on lemm.ee and lemmy.world which I actively use. It can get a bit annoying making sure that I stay subscribed to the same communities on both, but it’s also nice to get different feeds.
Another option would be to stand up your own closed instance, so your account is the only one. That way storage and bandwidth should be minimal enough that you can host at home and also have full control over settings on your instance.
So I could set up a private instance on, say, a pi and then never be at risk of losing my account? (Particularly interested in things like subscribed communities and saved posts)
In theory, yes. In practice, probably not? I don’t run an instance so I don’t know what resources you need but I suspect a pi isn’t going to be powerful enough. You’d definitely have to hook up some extra storage space at least.
You’d also still be at risk of losing your account if your hardware fails, you’d need a backup solution there too.
A pi is definitely powerful enough, the Lemmy software is super lightweight, but you’d definitely need the extra storage.
I think this is a little too glib about instances shutting down. If this happened it would lose not only my subscription list but also many of my favorite communities. It would take quite a bit of work to reconstruct what was lost.
You can export the list of subscribed communities in 0.19.
If you do that every now and then a shutdown would still hurt. As all the communities hosted on it would be lost but at least you can import your subscription list on another server.
Oh I should do that, thanks for the tip. That said, I think the loss of communities is the bigger issue.
Hopefully major instances if and when they shut down would communicate this well in advance to allow for an orderly migration.