this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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This topic is of extreme importance to the success of widespread adoption of the fediverse.
And I'm not seeing much discussion about it, despite having posted about it elsewhere, As an aside, I can't atm log in to the account where I brought this up, due to instability, or maybe a ddos. No telling, but that I can't log in shows a weakness that the general users won't tolerate. I suspect I've lost another account, along with the community I created and the attendant work, when a fmhy.ml went offline.
While non-tech people will come, there's a good chance they'll leave when lemmy.fmhy.ml, for example, disappears, taking their community and all their contributions with it.
There are many reasons why servers and domains will evaporate. And users will emigrate from an unstable, unreliable environment.
Redundancy and backup are critical. Maybe p2p is the solution, I don't know. The fix is above my pay grade.
But this weakness will be exploited. Pissed off instance owners, blackhats working for moneyed interests to whom the fediverse represents a multi-billion dollar threat, drive failures, lightning strikes, the 'how' doesn't matter. It's simply a matter of 'when,' and what will result.
This concept must become more resilient in order to be viable over the long term.
I mean the service is still up despite my instance being down. I was up and running on another instance in 5 minutes.
I think this is expectations just not matching the state of development we have now, it's new! Federation built on project urls will give way to stable instances when exactly stuff like this happens, but make no mistake we're in the reputation building phase right now. Being proactive about the unforseen is hard.
I fully expect some support for instance migration, there's already a few tools to back up. In the meantime I imagine best practices should include a note to make a couple accounts on different instances. Might help people understand the architecture as a bonus.
You're welcome to bring your community here. I've survived a few attacks that have taken others down. I'm a software engineer and infrastructure guy. My goal is 99.9% uptime.
I'm also working on some of these issues, or at least the tools to help identify them.
I think many servers will come and go mostly due to cost. There isn't a great way to cover costs today, and the cost get higher and higher as you grow. I'm in a unique situation than most, where I'm willing to take losses for a long time before donations catch up.
Based on my experience and observations, it appears that things will vanish, and I want to find a way to preserve them and react to it without ruining the image of the fediverse or Lemmy.
Thank you for the invitation, your efforts, and your financial commitment.
Servers will come and go, and for many reasons. Those to whom computers are black boxes will come, get lost, be easily discouraged, and go elsewhere. For the fediverse to supplant the dominant, monolithic platforms, it has to be stable and simple to use.
I'm insufficiently conversant to discuss the 'how' of making things secure and redundant. Maybe a p2p architecture, I don't know. But something along those lines that would have the fediverse resistant to decay.
I had restarted the lost community before receiving your kind offer. But if I start another, it will be here.
And again, thank you for all you're doing.