I might move again. (Or not)
I might move again. (Or not)
I moved from Lemmy.ml because I liked the name of Lemmy.world and it ran a newer Lemmy version which meant I could make communities. I moved from Lemmy.world because they defederated from piracy communities they didn't even host (but for some reason still kept the small piracy community they DID host) From thelemmy.club because I couldn't see the Hackintosh community from there (probably defederated) Now I spent some time looking on join-lemmy.org and checked out some instances and this (lemy.lol) instance seemed good, so I chose that.
I'll say it again and again, decentralization needs to be something the end user doesn't notice, signing up to Lemmy should be like signing up to a centralized service with the servers running things being decentralized and the info redundant so servers can go down without having any effect on the service.
Let the admins decide if they don't want to host content from certain communities, let the users decide if they want to block communities and users.
I don't think that'd work, with Lemmy being a federated model, not a fully decentralized one.
How do you handle the actual login? Does that mean every server has access to your password hash? Or do you overhaul the account system to use something like a private and public key, with the user needing to store and transfer the private key to every device they use?
And what happens if two people register with the same username on two instances that aren't federating? Do they somehow need to still communicate with all other instances in the network they operate in, to prevent that from happening? Because the alternative I see is the login being random in some way or tied to the instance, in which case you still lose the impression of a single service.
If I'm not mistaken, right now anybody could host a non-federating Lemmy instance, if they just wanted a small private community in this style. To my understanding, that's the idea behind federation, and a founding concept of Lemmy - it's not a giant service distributed across trusted servers, but a network of smaller communities that communicate with limited trust.
There are no instances anymore with this system, it's the data hosting that's decentralized, the front-end looks like a centralized website so you would go to Lemmy.com instead of whatever instance you signed up on.
Imagine Reddit but there's no central authority and instead of using a service like AWS it's just people providing storage space and bandwidth and they can decide not to host content from certain communities on their server, but from the user's point of view they wouldn't know where they're pulling the data from.
So no, you couldn't have two users with the same username. The user database could easily be shared by all storage providers or the database could be randomly split and you would have to mention what part of the database your info is stored on when logging in. When creating your account (where it checks for doubles on the whole username list hosted on all servers) you're given a random third credential that you need to mention when logging in so the service knows which servers host that part of the user database (all info including the database would have triple redundancy).
Right now a website's data might not be stored on a single server so that's already how things work, the difference is that all the different servers are owned by the same company (like Amazon or Google). In the backend the servers communicate together to provide the data to the users so it feels like everything is hosted in the same place.
TL;DR: The best way to fix things is to make it work like it does for any other websites but to only decentralize the hosting instead of also decentralizing the communities.
After seeing this post, I needed to check what server am I on right now anyway, didn't even remember, so I guess that's a good thing.
You're still dependent on a single point of failure, what I'm talking about is doing like any other website but instead of using a provider like AWS, you've got a bunch of people all over the world providing storage space and bandwidth and all data is stored on three servers in different locations at all times so there's basically no reason for the website to ever crash.
If you were to access Lemmy from a web browser you would need to remember what server you're signed up to because that's the website you would need to go to, you wouldn't be going to "Lemmy.com" or whatever.
You're right, but there's more to appreciate about needing to choose an instance.
It's like email. All email services work with all others, but the end user still needs to choose a good one. There are more than one "good one"s, and part of the decision is about personal taste.
And sometimes you have to leave a bad provider for a better one. Look at my account, it's brand new. Because lemm.ee has had one too many federation issues for my taste.
Ok, so your argument is basically "Look at this unrelated service, that's how it works too, so nothing wrong with the current service except that I had to do the thing that proves that what you're talking about would be better."
Eliminate the central authorities altogether, let people curate their feed so they don't have to worry about someone else making choices about their experience.
Someone could join Lemmy today and have no idea they're missing out on a big part of the available content because they joined the wrong instance, they would then turn around and just go back to Reddit where they know everything is available and they're in control of what they're subscribed to and what users they want to block.