Technology

Instance A goes down, you can't post as your user registered on instance A.

With cryptographic identities it's possible that instance A should be up only when you are registering your user. It's even possible with some delegated rights to another A user that only that user should be up when you are registering your user, the instance itself - not required.

I'm against the whole idea of federation like in XMPP or like in ActivityPub. It's stone age. It requires people to set up servers. It ties users to those servers. And communities are unnecessarily ties to servers. And their moderators.

Ideologically Retroshare looks nicer, for example.

You need to have messages, containing all the data I've described (who messages whom or who messages which communities and time of a message should be used to reduce the amount of data, ahem, stored and transferred by nodes, and also messages should list their dependencies, like - if you are giving some user some mod rights and taking them away a few times in a row, you need to know what the previous message was and the one before it), and shared storage. Shared storage here kinda breaks the beauty, because storage is finite and in fact probably those machines contributing it would function a lot like instances, replicating only communities they want.

Above that messages layer there'd be the imagined social network itself. I suppose it comes down to CRUD signed by user, user signed by an instance root or better a user delegated that right by an instance root. So everyone can send CRUD messages on anything, but what of all this the client considers depends on what they trust and the logic of processing rights. DoS protection and space conservation here are a case of dependency management, kinda similar to garbage collection.

Then entity types - I guess it's instance (people like that crap), community (I think this can be many-to-many with instances, instances are used for moderating users, communities for moderating posts), user (probably a derived user, from what I've heard but not understood about blind keys), public post (rich text with hyperlinks to entities by hash, everything is addressable by hash), blob (obvious), personal message (like public post, but probably encrypted and all that).

OK, dreams again

That's exactly what I did on Reddit, I'd only look at subreddits that I subscribed to. The only reason I'm here is because Reddit 180d on their API support and killed third party apps.

Yeah suggestions have never been implemented well but I relied on just viewing what I subscribed to for content. That plus suggestions from others that turned out pretty well. Post monetization and the removal of 3rd party apps made reddit unbearable so I'm glad to move on

They're called communities, but they're still your subscriptions, so in this context it works.

Yeah but it's tough to get some communities going, like the equivalent of r/NFL on reddit here is basically dead. More people also doesn't necessarily bring more interesting content, but it's tough finding similar communities that I had subbed to on other social media

This is why some of us are so focused on spreading the load.

I think it doesn't need to rapidly grow. The trickle of new users we get each time the main players fuck up is good enough for me.

You're mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a "national security issue."

I'm being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I'm unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.

EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.

Realistically if it is hit it'll be through some sweeping "social media safety" bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it's allowed to open registration.

We've already seen the UK's online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia's recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users