YSK: While you're on Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse, you're not "the product" but you're also not "the customer".locked
Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you've been invited into.
It has been said that "if you're not paying for the service, you're not the customer, you're the product."
It has also been said that "the customer is always right".
Right here and now, you're neither the customer nor the product.
You're a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You're using a service that you aren't being charged for; but that service isn't part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you're participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You've probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it's one of the most popular websites in the world, but it's not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don't imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They're not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they're also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
Hmm, distributed computing Lemmy instance, that's an interesting idea.
Storage of the database might be complicated, especially as user submissions increase. You might be able to break up the data and spread it across multiple hosts, but keeping it all synchronized as users add information would be complicated and probably have more lag time than the current issues sharing posts and comments across instances.
Can a Lemmy instance be effectively abstracted from the host server? Probably worth exploring.
Yes, by running your own Lemmy server :P
Is there a way to mirror an instance to spread the overhead and provide redundancy while still being admined and moderated by the same group of people as the original instance?
My immediate reaction is that mirroring would probably increase the overhead because of the additional message traffic needed to keep the mirrors in sync, but that's more a feeling than an informed opinion.