Communities would have to migrate.
who
Many would leave lemmy entirely. Either because they barely used lemmy anyway or the communities they were most invested in were lost.
Some would fragment across multiple instances, especially if the communities do so.
The bulk would probably move together to a single instance “annointed” as the new default.
Most communities would probably move to another server, causing the same funding problems elsewhere.
If .ml runs out of funds, there’s a good chance the devs are also running out of funds, so Lemmy may stop being maintained in that case.
I guess some communities would disappear and my feed might slow down a little bit. That’s about all I think I’d notice.
Unlike others, I’d expect a signicifant decline of posts as not only many users but also loads of communities would be lost. That’s why from my perspective users and communities should be evenly distributed across instances.
On top of that, there should be a feature to move entire accounts or communities to other instances. That way a community including all its members could just be migrated before a major shutdown.
Similarly, I think it would be a huge disturbance for the email system and possibly the entire internet world-wide if Gmail went down next month even though there are in theory plenty of alternative providers. Or supermarkets. If the IT of Walmart, Visa/MasterCard, Amazon AWS, Microsoft etc. have an outage it always has huge impact.
Lemmy as a whole isn’t that big and far from being critical infrastructure but we all want it to grow we should bear in mind that huge central services are always more risky than many small services.
In addition to features for migrating communities and accounts I think the ability to set up a special type of instance that just archives everything from all the instances it’s federated to would be a huge benefit.
Something along the lines of an instance that doesn’t allow new content to be created, only consumed. This way if an instance were to permanently close we could migrate it’s communities to other instances from the archive.
This could also extend to migration of lost accounts, though ensuring the original account holder is the one making a request could become a nightmare of an overhead. The situation could be improved though if lemmy got some sort of feature for linking accounts across multiple instances.
I’ve mentioned it elsewhere but the way Lemmy was implemented doesn’t make sense from a user perspective.
The hosting should be decentralized, there should only be one website.
Server admins would choose if they agree to host NSFW content or not and would have the power to stop hosting content from certain communities but it should have no impact on the user’s side.
All content should be hosted on three servers at all times so if one shuts down there’s still a main and a backup server until they’ve finished uploading the content to a third server. All the same content wouldn’t necessarily be hosted on the same servers, what’s important would just be that there’s triple redundancy.
So yeah, make it like any other website, just decentralize the hosting itself… and that’s exactly what providers for major websites do as a matter of fact, so just do the same thing but using servers owned by a bunch of people instead of one company that has server farms in multiple locations.
If you just decentralize only the physical hosting part how would you handle responsibilities such as moderation and other key decisions? If there’s one central instance deciding on what to allow and what to block or on topics such as advertising, trackers etc., wouldn’t Lemmy end up with similar issues as Reddit and other traditional social media websites?
It doesn’t require a central authority.
Moderation would work the same way it does right now, admins aren’t moderators.
An admin doesn’t want to host content from community X? They just block it from their server, it doesn’t matter, it’s hosted on two other servers and they’ll take care of sending the data to a third one.
Donations would be easy to automate via crypto, your public key would be part of the code, donation goes to the community and is split between the hosting servers.
Gmail getting the axe would be so bad it would get a section in history books
there should be a feature to move entire accounts or communities to other instances.
It’d be cool if you could specify a backup mirror community, so there could be an immediate failsafe.
That’s an amazing idea from my perspective which would really help the fediverse in general. Your proposal would solve not only the issue of instances disappearing completely but also temporary outages. For example Feddit.de as one of the biggest German instances had several technical issues lately. And as instances are typically administered by volunteers during their freetime that’s totally fine, accepted and expected. Such a failover concept would heavily reduce the pressure on their shoulders!
This is why I think there needs to be a way to recoup costs besides donations. Having a blended income is a good thing.
Donations, subscriptions, “gold”, maybe a light sprinkling of ads or sponsors, and even a paid api for LLMs to scrape.
Ads and data scraping? If we can’t survive without that I would rather go back to usenet, irc, and mailing lists etc.
Donations are the best way to keep all the Lemmy instances running.
If every active user donated just $5 a month, Lemmy would be able to thrive for years to come.
If Wikipedia can do it, why can’t Lemmy?
Just no to those shitty suggestions. Maybe you should go back to Reddit - you might be more comfortable there.
Not sure if this comment was supposed to end with /s or you actually unintentionally just listed the classic Reddit scenario.
People will just flock to other instances. There are a ton more instances other than .world and .ml. That’s the point of the fediverse. Lemmy won’t die.
Nothing. That’s the whole point of federation.
Other instances would still be online, and it would be business as usual there.
There would likely be discussion about it on other instances, but Lemmy wouldn’t shut down just because .world or .ml went offline.
Well, not exactly nothing, the communities on them would likely move or merge somewhere else.
Mass exodus to surviving instances, severe issues with account creation, and a novel sense of overcoming adversity for those who remain. If .ml’s admins also cease developing, lemmy will stagnate for quite a while. Coin flip survival or death within 2 years.
Bold of you to assume, that people only have one account.
I would have to find and re-subscribe to a whole bunch of .world communities.
The loss of .ml would just be a plain improvement overall.
Why is .ml bad?
Because it’s a tankie instance run by people worse then reddit moderators.
Tankies are cute. I feel protective of their moving naivety
Nothing much. I am on kbin.social and it is fine…
It seems to me like lemmy.world has more activity. One of my threads even has 6/7 upvotes and both commenters from it (on ps1graphics, which is a kbin community). Oddly on the blender community (also kbin?) my thread got 4 upvotes from different instances but no comments.
There is a lot more activity on !artshare (a lemmy.world community, if that community link does not work properly).
Hey, would you mind linking me to that ps1 graphics and blender community?
More instances would pop-up to replace them
It is like asking what would happen to the internet if the servers of Facebook, Instagram, Google, Xitter, and Reddit would disappear overnight
The fediverse is like the internet, on the internet.
I would start questioning either ML’s capacity to do anything, or our own need for what they’re peddling.
