Starting your own instance doesn’t solve the problem of big communities being reliant on the one specific instance they are hosted on to not go down or rogue.

I imagine it like friend requests between communities: x@instance.a, all-about-x@instance.b and x-is-great@instance.c could send each other friend requests and merge into one federated meta-community about x. Then if one instance goes down the other two are still there to keep the meta-community alive, and if one goes rogue the others can just unfriend and keep going without it.

The nice thing about manual federation is that the communities don’t have to have exactly the same name, and the mods can keep malicious or troll communities out. And ofc you could still have client-side control if you want to, e.g. add or remove a community just for you locally, or create your own local meta-community.

The database, storage and network are usually the bottlenecks in these kinds of websites, not the programming language. It might add a few ms of latency, but the big lags come from congestion or bad db queries.

If you decide to go down the Synology route, make sure it supports docker. Their cheaper models don’t support it, and it’s the gateway to self-hosting all the services that are not available directly from the package manager.

There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.

I don’t intent to be rude, but this is just not how you build a decentralized/distributed system. The network would grind to a halt if every user app had to search recursively through a portion of the network, and aggregate & rank posts by itself. Aggregate values (communities, votes and so on) would never be right, because you’d never be able to acually gather all events for a particular entity in time. This might work in a local network of 10 nodes, but not on a global scale.

On top, who would pay for those nodes you are querying? There is no relationship between the users and the nodes, so why would anyone just run a node for others or be willing to pay anyone else in this scenario? Servers cost money and stuff. And your spam filtering and moderation solution would be the exact same as with instances, so nothing is gained here.

Maybe have a look at the Session messenger and their Oxen network. They go to great length to make sure the work is equally distributed among nodes and they are compensated fairly. This doesn’t just happen magically by itself, and there are many bad actors who will try to exploit any weakness they can find.

So I just think it’s impossible to create something like lemmy in an anonymous way, because content moderation is a human decision. There is no one correct mathematical solution, and I also can’t send some kind of filter query to a server to do it for me. All I can do is read the general rules that another human being has wrote up, subscribe to their moderation “service”, see how they are doing, and decide to stay or switch to another.

Similarly, if I don’t want to aggregate all the posts in the world by myself (as you are suggesting), then I’ll have to fine someone to do it for me, and somehow pay that someone for their service. This part is actually kind of solvable (again look at Session), but it is not straight forward at all! It would involve crypto currencies, mining/staking, and some kind of client-side monetization. For this part I think trusted instances are just a much better solution, because we are building a social structure here anyway.

Idk if you really can copyright a letter of the alphabet.

That’s the capitalistic definition of freedom. Everything is allowed as long as you have the money.

Sure 😁

I think the one thing we could adopt from crypto is having public keys as user IDs, instead of tying it to an instance. But that would require users to handle their own keys, and people are just reeeaaally bad at that!

What I’m saying is that you cannot do those features with what you’re proposing, regardless of what you might want to do.

Of course! Moderation is censorship. There is certain content I don’t want to see, and I don’t want to have to filter it myself so I join a community of seemingly likeminded people who censor content based on rules I generally agree with. They ban users who break the rules, keep spambots out, block malicious instances and so on, and if they are doing their job right then it builds trust and attracts more people.

what about it makes you think that to be the case?

Because you want to strip all that out and abstract it away. Who do you think would do the moderating and spam blocking? Who aggregates posts from all over the world and presents a sorted list to a user on their smartphone? It would be the wild west with users having to do everything themselves. I know it’s tempting to think about building a Fediverse without instances, but afaik you need these social structures for the system to work.

Crypto for example only works because you can define the rules mathematically beforehand, and then hand out money for computers to check them. That’s just not possible with a public forum, at least not yet imo.

Cryptocurrencies and social platforms are completely different beasts. In crypto I want no moderation/censorship, I want anonymity, and there is a payout system so nodes can compete for something. This is all different when building a social network, so you can’t just use the same architecture. Building social structures and trust is desirable in a public forum, not something you want to get rid of.

Wow that looks good, thank you very much!

This is not the solution! Being able to pick a server to trust your data and content moderation with is a feature, not a bug.

What we do have to do is make this feature more resilient and easier to use. Like adding the ability to easily transfer accounts and communities between instances, or even change the domain name of an entire instance.

Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don’t see that as a user. Also it’s a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.

Looks good so far, but two major features I want from a note taking app are still missing: Handwriting and table calculations. If they can add good support for those then I’ll definitely switch!

Afaik it is all connected to the domain name, so they could definitely start to impersonate any .ml instance. Other instances could detect that the signing key for federation messages changed, but that’s about it. Their admins would probably have to block/defederate them manually.

Not really. Most centralized services are accessible via multiple domains, e.g. for different countries. This would just disable one of them, but users could still use another to log into their accounts. For the Fediverse it “disables” an entire instance, cuts it off from federation and locks out users.

Lets not put a positive spin on a situation that exposes a weakness of the current system. The federation protocol needs to be able to handle these things gracefully, like propagating domain changes and migrating accounts between instances!

A domain takedown was never able to shut a server down, not even with centralized servers. Most big services are accessible via multiple domains of different countries, and this would just disable one of them. But for the Fediverse that means that they also “disabled” an entire instance with all its users.

This actually shows us that relying on domains can be a problem for the Fediverse! Imo we need to upgrade the federation protocol to be able to handle these things, like propagating a domain change or migrating accounts to other instances.

Just leaving this here: Aurora Store

I’ve tried a few and landed on the “VaKo 12 Ports Dockingstation”. Most reliable hub I used so far. I bought it 3 years ago and it’s still working flawlessly.