To actually keep data persistent on IPFS and not be deleted by the garbage collector, you need to have a server(s) pin the node that holds that data.
You either host these servers yourself, or pay providers to store it for you.
And at that point you just reinvented a server simply hosting your data but with extra steps.
There’s a big issue with this.
If malicious content like CP gets uploaded on to a server, obviously other servers do not want this to be replicated to their servers. So how would you solve this problem? Well they could give all moderation power to the original server they’re replicating, but that could be far too slow or they could even miss malicious content like this. Or maybe they even disagree about taking down certain things.
Another solution is that any server participating in the content mirroring could take it down for just themselves or for all the other members as well. The issue here is now you’re expanding moderation abilities, while also giving the other servers much more responsibilities.
It’s not as simple as wanting to replicate content. If you host it, you are responsible for any illegal content a user may upload to it. Not to mention laws vary by country as well. Ignoring the technical challenges here, it’s also mandatory that the other servers replicate the other servers data to also choose to be responsible for what gets uploaded. And that is a really big ask. The law doesn’t care about the technical reasons, they’ll just see illegal content uploaded to your server.
Personally I’m in the camp that I want history to be lost. That’s part of the appeal to me. In fact my favorite feature in the fedi is Mastodon’s option to enable auto-deleting posts of a certain age.
Only content that is explicitly pinned or reaches a certain amount of interactions should be saved imo. Since that’s the stuff you’d actually want to preserve rather than the 99% of forgettable content, and it would also drastically cut down on file hosting.
Another thing is that a federation should only act as the exchange between users on ActivityPub. It should only cache relevant information and not be expected to store everything, like I wrote before. The user should be a portable account that is stored on a device. The federation server would sync your account between your devices, but not store it. You send your content to the federation, and then the federation sends it out into the world where they choose to do what they want with it. The federation shouldn’t hoard it indefinitely.
Also this makes sense from a privacy perspective. If you care about privacy, why would you also want all your data indefinitely stored? Unless certain things are relevant and explicitly kept, it should be expected to expire and be lost by default. Where did we get this expectation that data should be stored forever? Also you expect it to be stored forever and not be trained on by AI?
This comment for example, after about a week or two most of the visibility and interaction of it will drop to zero. At that point, this comment should expire and no longer exist. I wrote this comment, it reached some people, and served it’s purpose and should expire. I’m not going to pretend like this comment is some kind of historic document that should be indefinitely preserved, nor do I expect or want it to be.
Why would you need to host this? Why not just have a client that does backups?
Well it’s “allegedly” decentralized, which should solve this by design…
Big W change. EU should try to copy this idea.
Glad to see it is built on top of the Solid protocol. Cuz I was going to say it sounded familiar!
tcp
Very cool fellow consumers
Feels like we’re 20 years too early for that, but I hope it works out well. That’s the inevitable long term solution.
Should be a server setting, just like how some servers can choose to show combined votes or separate up/down votes.
So it basically failed the bus factor
Hopefully mbin becomes more resilient, or if Lemmy just gets some nice rewrites.
Hard to tell imo. Big tech has a lot of big advantages and disadvantages over us.
Being centralized and heavily funded, it’s a lot easier for them to rapidly create/change new things, for better or for worse. It also means they do a lot of the testing for us. Mastodon/Lemmy formats are figured out from what we liked from proprietary platforms, then we kept the core that made it good. We also don’t need to make a worse user experience by worrying about monetization.
We also have a lot less development, and I won’t even pretend that Mastodon or Lemmy are anywhere near well developed as Reddit/Twitter backends and other software. We simply don’t have the attention and funding to be anywhere near that level.
I don’t think we’ll ever replace big tech, but I just hope we stay on a healthy trajectory where we are alongside them in popularity.
This is a great site to find instances:
Do they even have advertisers? Tbh I’ve had adblockers on for years I wouldn’t even know.
This isn’t reddit. There’s a clear solution here: decentralization. Aka, like the entire point why we’re on Lemmy in the first place. Join another instance lol.
Another good looking comment from a total stud
I know that everytime I look in the mirror
Friendly tutorial for those looking to swap to an easy-to-use modern distro!
I think the massive privacy benefits outweigh things like that, which should be documented properly anyways