I get the impression that we’re headed for the same issues that pop up when we put all our eggs in one basket with Reddit/FB/whatever. People flock to the largest instance, and someday that instance could go down due to cost or the host losing interest.
I’m wondering whether it would be technically achievable to have servers/instances and federation where the communities are essentially mirrored or have broadly distributed existence - maybe even with user storage a la torrents.
If there’s a large blargh@lemmy.here community and a small blargh@lemmy.there community, all of the discussion, images, contributions to lemmy.here die if the server goes down for good. Yes, the users can relocate to lemmmy.there - even under the same community name - but it’s not the same as having full continuity of a completely mirrored community.
I realize this concept has technical hurdles and would involve a reimagining of how the fediverse works, but I worry we’re just setting up for another blowup at some TBD date when individual sysadmins decide they’ve had enough. If it’s not truly distributed and just functions as a series of interconnected fiefdoms, communities and their information won’t survive outages, deaths, and power struggles.
Yeah, trust and federation is a concept that would have to be worked out in this model. I think it would require some critical-mass of federation amongst instances to establish trust. I wonder if this is an actual application for [dodges beer can] blockchain technology…
And how would a blockchain help?
To be honest I don’t have a clue but my lay understanding is that it’s a tool for establishing trust or authenticity in a distributed system. It was a half-serious suggestion because I’ve always heard those who are much more knowledgeable than me say that it has essentially no worthwhile applications.