Hmm, maybe they are running some developer release? I don't think this has made it into an official release yet, and if so that must have happend very recently (I tried selfhosting Pixelfed about 6 months ago and it wasn't available yet).
Well, like I wrote below, it is basically about scaling Lemmy across multiple servers, with all the complexity that entails. I am probably not the best person to given advise on that though.
If our smaller instance ever gets to a size that is not feasible to run on a single server anymore, we will likely close registrations.
I am not against showing cross-post links like Lemmy currently does. That helps finding communities that you have not subscribed to yet (but are already known to your instance). But automatically loading all the comments as well seems a bit too much to me.
We are talking about a feature that makes it easier to view comments, so general concerns about the feed concept aside (I find it a bad idea), it seems like forcing people to block communities so that their comments are not inserted into threads they are otherwise interested in seems counterproductive. It would be better to only show comments from communities that the user has actively subscribed to before.
Like for example I might be interested in the discussions happening on politics@instance.world, but the comments in threads at politics@instance.ml is something I would rather avoid. So this feature would force me to block politics@instance.ml which is the opposite of making it easier to read the comments from communities I am actually interested in.
Lets agree to disagree on the "natural" centralisation aspect, which is IMHO nonsense. And very recently the US empire was beaten by some tribes in Afghanistan, so I think your argument needs some further thinking 😏
The reason it gets so much more expensive after a few thousand users is complexity. Up to that point a single server can be used and the necessary sysadmin skills are not very high. Basically anyone with a few weeks of training can rent a server and run such an instance.
After a few thousand users it gets steeply more complex, when you need to think about running a database cluster and load-balance the frontends etc. Not very many people have the necessary skillset for that, and even less are volunteering to do this. So you end up being forced to hire someone expensive with a high in demand skill. Basically your operation suddenly jumps from an easy to fund with donations volunteer effort, to a must commercialize or otherwise fund venture that is highly unsustainable in the short term.
As someone who runs a Lemmy server I can tell you that it isn't as simple as that.
Yes, there is an initial benefit from having more users on an instance, but this initial scaling benefit isn't linear. It rather abruptly stops at a few thousand users and after that it becomes much harder and more expensive to scale further. Only after going over that hump it might become cheaper again at the scale of hundred-thousand of users or so, but Lemmy the software is currently also unlikely to scale as a single instance to such numbers, so it isn't just a system operator question.
So no, unless you want to fully commercialize the Fediverse and bring in external investors to fund the getting over that initial hump, semi-centralisation is not a feasible way forward. And what would even be the point of that? Reddit exists and is basically the same.
Luckily ActivityPub is designed to scale horizontially through lots of smaller (but not tiny) instances, so I think we can manage without the above.
It requires a bunch of browser features that non-user browsers don't have, and the proof-of-work part is like the least relevant piece in this that only gets invoked once a week or so to generate a unique cookie.
I sometimes have the feeling that as soon as some crypto-currency related features are mentioned people shut off part of their brain. Either because they hate crypto-currencies or because crypto-currency scammers have trained them to only look at some technical implementation details and fail to see the larger picture that they are being scammed.
This goes to the main developer, which is a person in Canada. But I think they have a few collaborators that will likely get on board more now that they want to set up a non-profit (?) foundation to manage the Pixelfed codebase and IP.
This is or at least was a problem with cross-posts in the same community in Lemmy as well. I think now Lemmy just prevents posts with the same URL to be counted as crossposts when they are in the same community.
The server can swap to a modified JS that exfiltrates the e2ee key and thus allows the server owner to decrypt the messages, or in more advanced encryption schemes add additional keys without you knowing and achieve the same thing.
Yes you can juryrig something like that with cookies, but it is highly fragile and browser based e2ee is basically a scam anyways as the server serving the website can always swap out the javascript that decrypts the messages.
e2ee is not really compatible with what you want due to necessary key management, and once you drop that there are so many possible options for what you want that I don't want to list them all here.
Movim does, for Libervia and Dino I am not 100% sure right now, but at least for Libervia the browser version should have it as it is really more of a general Webrtc browser feature than client specific.
Unified Push support would be great.