RagingNerdoholic

Yeah, I gotta be honest, it works really poorly here, especially when viewing all/hot. It's just constantly loading new posts and pushing down and off-screen whatever you're trying to read or click. It's frankly unusable.

This type of thing should be a user setting, not a site wide setting, IMO.

Yep, this is exactly what I meant. Just the option to disable auto post loading so you see whatever posts where loaded at the time you initially opened the page. If I want to see new posts, I can hit reload myself.

Forearms. It's always forearms.

Reddit following in their footsteps shortly after

Right, good point. Scroll down, it disappears. Scroll up, it reappears regardless of scroll position.

Good question. Not sure what the best procedure might be here. Could be as simple promoting them in order of initial mirror deployment dates and the others become mirrors for the newly activated instance.

Triggering the activation could be a part of an instance decommissioning procedure where the operator selects the mirror to become the successor. Maybe there could be some basic system specs and network performance reporting so they could choose the optimal instance. Users would receive a message that their account is being moved to another instance and domain.

In the event of an unexpected outage, there could be a deadman switch style timeout where the fastest mirror activates automatically after the original instance is out for long enough, but also a process for the operator of the downed instance to delay the takeover by signaling, "I'm working on it." In the event of automatic takeover, since users wouldn't be able to receive messages, there would have to be some sort of global lemmy notice system so users of the downed instance know where to go, like a sticky post on the front page or maybe just a separate "notices" page.

That's definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It's basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it's associated with goes down with it.

It's a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.

Yeah, I'll probably do that at some point, but I think repo issues are supposed to be single topic, so I'll have to do that when I have more time.

These are some issues I've been thinking about as well.

What's to stop someone from impersonating another user on a different instance? Maybe there should be a distributed user index amongst instances to prevent duplicate usernames?

I think making the federalized infrastructure incumbent upon users to understand and select is not something the average user is going to bother with. This is complicated problem, I don't know the answer might be off the top of my head.

And what happens when an instance goes down? Does every user and their history get torched? Is there a migration process or at least a decommissioning policy in place?