Hi Lemmy!
I’m studying webdevelopment, i love the concept of the fediverse and activitypub, but i still see it as really new and needing to get better of course.
I will just throw out some first impressions, these are just from a first sight so i’d be happy if you make me notice i’m saying something false or inaccurate.
As i said in the title i would really love to collaborate, so i’m just exposing stuff i would love to work to, just to see what others think about it and if they could be theoretically possible.
The Fediverse claims to be highly interconnected, yet i cannot use the account i have on a mastond instance on Lemmy, and neither the opposite. I don’t see why there has to be many instances of the same thing and so many accounts needed to access, for example if i want to browse Kbin with my Lemmy account, i won’t be able to, but i can create a new account and find some content of Lemmy on it or browse privately.
The system of mentions is quite confusing as well and i don’t see these differentiation of istances a pro for the network, if an istance goes down the content on that istance goes down as well.
More that having to reference each server istance, it would maybe be an idea to have one single domain holding all the istances, much like IPFS and blockchain nodes. More servers hosting the content for the same platform, backed up by a pinning service such as Pinata for IPFS, not different servers holding different content loads.
I want to be able to subscribe to one single Fediverse account, and be able to use it in every different federated platforms.
I’ll take the user login as an example: If i login in a federated platform, IPFS would perform a node lookup and find my account details on one of the federated servers, instead of having to specify which server i want the account info to be coming from.
All of this would still need to be backed up: 1- because node lookup is quite slow 2- because if one or more istances go down, there has to be a reliable and fast backup available to keep the platform running, even if the content is already duplicated in more IPFS servers.
Of course with this option there HAS to be a central server with all the data on it in order to make them readily available and make the user experience acceptable.
Another possibility would be using really light languages (such as Rust that doesn’t have a runtime for example) to build the platforms and see what the performances are WITHOUT a pinning service and so without the need of a central server.
Please don’t be harsh on me, i’m just jotting down some ideas!
I’ll try and get through as many of your questions as I can:
The Kbin - Lemmy connection should be fixed as soon as kbin.social sorts out their cloudflare issues (it’s blocking federation messages).
Mastodon accounts can follow communities and post here. We can respond to mastodon accounts that post here. Until/unless we have a “Subscribe to user” feature, following mastodon accounts doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.
If an instance goes down temporarily, all other instances with subscribers can still interact with the cached content, which will get synced back once that instance comes back up. If it goes down permanently, yeah. Nothing we can do about that.
If a single domain holds all instances, that’s a single point of failure and the admin of that single domain de-facto controls the network. That’s not what we’re trying to do here. If you mean sharding an instance so that a single instance can be run on multiple servers, that’s a huge amount of coding work. Maybe if things keep growing, sometime in the future that’ll be necessary, but for the time being that’s a stupidly gigantic amount of work for not much gain.
Single account for all instances would trample on their autonomy. Each instance should have control over their own users, servers, communities, etc. You’re still thinking about this as Reddit 2.0 instead of an interconnected network.
I agree instances should back up their content. I think we should make sure our respective instance admins do their due diligence. I don’t agree in this centralized mandatory backup authority you’re talking about.
The whole backend of Lemmy is already written in Rust, for exactly the performance reasons you mentioned.