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.

This is the main issue I see right now as well. I created my own instance for my account to live on, just so I know it will be there as long as I want it to. But that doesn't do anything for communities I'm subscribed to that could, potentially, be on an instance that later goes down.

I think communities of similar topics are going to need to coordinate in the long run, and perhaps run their own instance to house their communities. This way the folks running the community and the folks hosting it are one in the same. You'd have instances that mainly house users, and perhaps a community or two. That's where most folks would have their main account. Then you'd have instances that mainly house content, with few users besides the moderation/admin team(s).

I believe it is saved first on the instance you're signed up for, then gets pushed around the network using the Activity pub protocol. So it eventually ends up being stored across many instances of it has far enough reach.

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

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.

Wasn't Soylent Green algae based at first?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The orchestral arrangement is just too good. Thanks George Martin.