lemm.ee has shut down at 00:14 UTC.
unfortunately I realized too late that I have had hundreds of saved links to posts and comments from there, so I did not have enough time to save them, but anyways it is interesting that maybe a third of the post links I could try were dead. I think linkrot is happening much faster here than on reddit, even if just counting deleted posts.
Imho, it comes down to how much you care about the content of the community you are building. The reason I’m in lemmy.ml and not some smaller instance is because of problems like the ones showcased here.
If I could self-host my own content I would not mind being somewhere else. In fact, I’m considering setting up something through brid.gy. The fact that there isn’t a separation of the hosting means that if I want to secure my content I need to have my own 1-person instance which is not something the protocol is very well suited for. Plus it’s likely most lemmy instances would not federate with it anyway since, understandably, they may prefer an allowlist approach rather than blocklist. The only sane way would be to have the instances have full control of the access as they are now, with storage being in a separate service that can be managed separately, the hosting service.
Would this change at all if there was a hosting service?
I expect you would still be recommended to mod from local accounts (the “authenticator”), even if the content hosting was a separate service. The local account would continue being the primary source of access to the content… note that having a separate hosting service doesn’t mean that the hosting service must be the one managing access to the content from the fediverse.
Quite a few instances are managed by non-profits which are much less prone to service disruptions, like https://fedecan.ca/en/ for lemmy.ca.
Isn’t that contradictory with the users - content separation?
That seems contradictory with the previous point. My understanding was that
Is this correct, or am I missing something?
Then I think we had a different understanding. My understanding was something akin to what bluesky does with the PDS, the data service just hosts data and hands it over to the other service which is the one actually doing the indexing of that data and aggregating it into communities. The data of the community might be hosted in the hosting services, but it’s accessed, indexed and aggregated through the authentication service.
The access management, the accounts, the distribution of data, etc. that’s still in the server managing the federation. That’s the way I understood it, at least (I’m not the person that originally started this train, that was @[email protected] ).
This allows the content to potentially not be completely lost if an instance dies because it would be easier to carry your data to another instance without losing it. It’s the same principle as in bluesky but applied to the fediverse.
Ah, I see. So something like https://activitypods.org/ ?
That would be an improvement indeed, but probably not something we will see any time soon.
There’s several solutions, I was just stating the “at least” solution because everything needed for it is already present. You just need to remove functionality depending on the type of service you want to host.