Wasn’t Soylent Green algae based at first?

Would be an interesting idea to fork and do a ‘Lemmy Lite’ which is just a single-person instance, doesn’t host any communities, but lets you join communities/federate with them the same way a full install does.

Oh for sure–I just spun up a new droplet to throw it on. There are Docker instructions as well.

The ansible install on ubuntu wasn’t too bad, tbh. I haven’t touched anything backend since I installed, and it’s been chugging!

That’s how I went. Time will tell if it eats storage etc, but so far I’m loving the control I have over who to federate with.

I wonder how that would work if an instance gets abruptly shut down. Maybe each time you make an account you get a ‘recovery key’ that you can link to your new account on a new instance, thereby taking ownership of your old posts (or at least the ones that got federated out of your old instance).

That’s a good idea. Allow communities to choose if they are globally or locally subscribable.

I decided to self-host my own instance for that reason. That way I’m actually totally in control of what I’m seeing. It does make finding new communities less organic, but it’s easy enough with the new listing tools. Probably not worth the money if all I ran on my server was Lemmy, but as an added service it’s great.

100%! I’m excited to see more growth. The federation between kbin and lemmy is great. I love that it can also federate with anything else using ActivityPub, basically.

You are now banned from r/pyongyang

100%. It appears to me this new community is already serving the purpose of the old one!

Never thought about how this relates to net neutrality. Reddit was kind of becoming a “common carrier” for information, but as a centralized source it’s in their interest to filter content for money’s sake. Here in the fediverse the communities (and their data) are cloned but constantly updated across many independently owned servers. So no one server owner can ever really steer the discourse. We just need an official way to migrate a community in the case an instance goes down/stops meeting the needs of the community.

I’d like to be a pirate, it’s a pirate’s life for me

Thanks for hosting!

Exactly. Bring all that discussion and content over here, then we are actually in control of it. We can’t expect anything to change when Reddit thinks there’s no viable alternative.

Nice. I think the Fediverse is the way to go for communities like this.

I feel like that could lead to issues as well. The best way for the fediverse to work is users spread out across many small/medium instances.

Certainly feels like there’s some ‘ignorance is bliss’ to it. Folks don’t want to hear something is an ad because it takes away the illusion that their feed is in their control. And they don’t want to feel gullible.

Love that idea. Servers could distinguish if they want to be a general ‘home instance’ for users, and those that opt in could communicate with each other and push accounts around as necessary. Servers could calculate their likelihood to accept a new incoming account based on some heuristics the admin could set, with sensible defaults. That way the system would self-balance itself as new instances appear and as mature ones reach capacity. Of course for that to work there would have to be some central authority keeping track of account locations for login purposes.

Spreading out is definitely the way to make this thing work. I’m sure there is more that can be implemented to help with federation speed, making sure you have all comments, etc. Those are solved with a monolith instance, but as we see you need a monster server to do it. I think instances averaging less than a few thousand users each will be the way to move forward.